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RIVAL FRENCH COURTS 



TO 

ANABEL DOUGLAS 

I^e charme est a P esprit ce que la grace est au corps 




HENRI JULES DE BOURBON, 

PRINCli DK CONDK. 



Fron tispiece. 



RIVAL 
FRENCH COURTS 

THE EXPERIENCES OF A LADY-IN-WAITING 

AT SCEAUX, AT VERSAILLES, AND 

IN THE BASTILLE 

BY S. H. LOMBARDINI 



WITH PORTRAITS 



NEW YORK 

THE MACMILLAN CO. 

1913 



1>y 



\^ 



V 



:^% 



Bequest 

Albert Adsit Clemons 

Aug. 24, 1938 

(Not available for exchange) 



Q 



INTRODUCTION 

The heroine of the following pages was without 
wealth, without position, without influence, at 
least as these are counted in the circles in which 
she moved ; she could not bestow great favours 
upon her friends, nor awaken even small fears 
in the heart of her enemies. Yet her Memoirs, 
when they appeared a few years after her death, 
were greeted with an eagerness, read with a 
glow of interest which few writings have called 
forth. 

Madame de Sevigne, the Due de Saint-Simon, 
whose eyes had seen more and that more clearly 
than is given to most mortals to see, were never 
read, as authors, by their contemporaries. Nearly 
forty years elapsed after Madame de Sevigne's 
death before her letters. Memoirs in matter if 
not in form, were published and circulated ; more 
than a hundred years had heaped their dust 
upon Saint-Simon's ruthless portraits before they 
were revealed to the public ; but scarcely three 
years had passed after Madame de Staal's death, 

before Paris began to turn over eagerly the 

V a 2. 



vi INTRODUCTION 

leaves of her newly published Memoirs. They 
were in all hands, her name was on all lips. . . . 

"Yes, all the women think so, but all the 
men do not ..." said Troublet, sweeping all 
Paris into his answer to an ill-natured remark 
upon the topic of the hour. The remark had 
come from Fontenelle ; he was then close upon 
his hundredth year, and his soul had dried within 
him. " I am sorry for her," he had said of 
Madame de Staal, whom he had counted 
among his friends, "this is written with agree- 
able elegance, but it was not worth writing 
at all." 

Posterity has not sided with Fontenelle ; over 
and over again, from women whom time and 
distance have rendered impartial, as well as from 
men endowed by heaven with natural fairness, 
we hear these spontaneous expressions of delight 
which a truly human document cannot fail to 
call forth. Madame de Staal has a sense of 
humour deliciously companionable, a charming 
directness most unique in that time of meander- 
ing periphrases, a philosophy so true and so dis- 
cerning that it holds and fascinates. 

" It seems to me," says Sainte-Beuve, " that 
the Memoirs of Madame de Staal should be 
re-read at the beginning of each winter, at the 
end of autumn, beneath the November trees to 
the sound of the falling foliage." 



INTRODUCTION vii 

Yes, a certain note of sadness runs all through 
these Memoirs, and yet they read like a fairy 
tale — but a fairy tale with a human ending: joy 
declines through its pages, as it declines through 
the human years, as the sun declines through 
the autumn to the winter. There is a sudden 
turn of the wheel of fate, and instead of "living 
happily ever after " the heroine meets unhappiness 
face to face, and hears its footsteps dogging her 
own for ever on the unexpected path into which 
she has been forced. 

Her childhood and her youth had been en- 
compassed with joy and love and adulation ; like 
a veritable little queen she had seen all who 
approached her acknowledge her sway, forestall 
her desires, extoll her decisions, and she had 
taken it as a matter of course. Her grace, her 
wit, her wisdom had been to her like so many 
magic wands — then the unexpected happens, and 
the young queen wakes up one morning to find 
herself a waiting maid ! How does she bear her- 
self under such crushing conditions ; how does she 
draw from her very servitude the elements of the 
triumph which she is to accomplish, the greatest 
triumph, immortality in the minds of men ? that 
question stimulates for ever the imagination, as one 
turns over the pages of Madame de Staal's Memoirs. 

It is true she lived at a time peculiarly charged 
with dramatic possibilities ; the last years of 



viii INTRODUCTION 

Louis XIV.'s reign, the first years which followed 
his death were perhaps more fraught with passion 
than any other time in French history. The 
fortress of absolutism and of tradition was 
crumbling down, the walls had fallen, and there 
lay revealed to eager and passionate eyes avenues 
endless and unexplored. But fate had enclosed 
Madame de Staal Delaunay within a magic circle 
in which all eyes were resolutely closed to 
realities. While the rest of France was coming 
fast into its natural inheritance; a sane desire to 
test the efficacy of thought by the efficacy of 
deeds, the little court of Sceaux, where Madame 
de Staal lived, persisted in treating thought as a 
futile plaything, and jangled words as a court 
jester jangles his bells, for the mere pleasure of 
hearing them tinkle. Madame du Maine, " queen 
of Sceaux " as she liked to hear herself called, 
masqueraded through life, a be-ribonned shep- 
herdess, a nymph, a goddess, as fancy prompted, 
and forced into her masquerade all those who came 
into contact with her. She also dragged them 
with her into a conspiracy, which has its place in 
history, yet savours more of a comedy than of a 
political undertaking, dragged them incidentally 
into prison, and having herself emerged from a 
" cruel " captivity without having learned anything 
therefrom about the realities of life, she went 
back unchanged to her absurdities. 



INTRODUCTION ix 

For fully twenty-five years longer she afforded 
the France of Voltaire and of the Encyclopedists 
the astonishing spectacle of a topsy-turvydom, 
where all played at being something which 
they were not, and strove night and day to 
outdo one another in futilities. Madame du 
Maine did it from choice, and her courtiers 
were hypnotised into it with or without their 
consent. As a representative of the " divine " 
right of the greater to impose their whims upon 
the smaller, Madame du Maine is indeed 
unsurpassed. 

*' If you wish," says Sainte-Beuve, " to study in 
a perfect specimen, and as if under the microscope, 
the dainty egotism the fantastic and coquettish 
despotism of a princess of the blood in the olden 
time, and the artless impossibility in which she 
lived of conceiving any other existence in the 
world than her own, go to Sceaux, there you 
will see these gross defects in miniature, just 
as we see gold-fish moving in the sunshine in 
a transparent bowl." 

It is that " transparent bowl " which Madame 
de Staal Delaunay holds up to our eyes, and 
upon it she brings to play most skilfully the 
light of her humorous wisdom and philosophy. 
She lived in the atmosphere of Sceaux, yet was 
not of it ; though she breathed it day after 
day, its narcotic properties could not dull her 



X INTRODUCTION 

clear vision nor drug her independent spirit. 
She is that rare exception among exceptions : 
an insider capable of taking an outsider's point 
of view. She has been much read, much dis- 
cussed — the details of her life not mentioned 
in her Memoirs have been supplied by enthusi- 
astic biographers. One rather unaccountable 
error seems to have slipped into most of these 
biographies ; started by one, repeated by the 
others, it gave rise to a good deal of controversy : 
the date of Mademoiselle Delaunay's birth has been 
stated over and over again as 1693, and accord- 
ing to that she would have been barely eighteen 
when she entered Madame du Maine's service — 
What ! said sceptic readers, a girl of eighteen, 
inexperienced, impressionable, delicately nurtured 
is suddenly called to fight life at most cruel 
odds and bears no apparent marks of its blows ! 
The "indelible mark of the waiting-maid," as 
she herself calls it, is stamped so early upon her 
character, yet her dignity rises above it as a tall 
lily rises undefiled above the swamp in which it 
is rooted — impossible ! there is some falsification ! 
— womanlike, Madame de Staal Delaunay has 
tampered with her dates ! Upon closer inspec- 
tion one realises, however, that there has been 
no voluntary error of date in the Memoirs. 
Mademoiselle Delaunay does not state with any 
precision the year of her birth ; moreover the 



INTRODUCTION xi 

fact that certain historical events are mentioned 
by her as contemporary with certain circumstances 
of her life might have prevented the initial error. 
It is now commonly thought that Mademoiselle 
Delaunay was not in her nineteenth but close 
upon her twenty-sixth year when she entered 
Madame du Maine's service. She was ready to 
unravel the bewildering complexity of elements 
which were to make up her life at Sceaux, and 
although the sum total of it all was to be sad- 
ness, it was also to be fullness and richness of 
experience. It was given to her to taste of the 
bitterness and of the joy of life, of its futility 
and of its fervour ; to her was given, moreover, 
that gift of expression which is the true liberator 
of the soul. 

" She saw true," says Sainte - Beuve, in the 
charming chapter which he devotes to her, " and 
it was given to her to transmit to us what she saw. 
If she missed more than one gift of fate, she 
at least had those of mind, language, and taste. 
Some of her least sayings have come into the 
circulation of society and have added to the 
riches of the mind of France. More than that 
— by her noble conduct during a miserable 
conspiracy, she has won a place in all future 
history. How many statesmen who think them- 
selves great men and who are striving all their 
lives, do not obtain as much ! " 



CONTENTS 



CHAP. PAQE 

I, AT THE CONVENT OF SAINT-SATJVETJR ... 1 

n. THE MAKQtnS DE SILLY 8 

III. KNOCKING AT THE DOOR OF FORTUNE . . 21 

IV. THE DUO AND DUCHESSE DU MAINE ... 39 
V. THE COURT OF SCEAUX 53 

. VI. GREAT TRIALS AND SMALL TRIUMPHS ... 67 

Vn. SLAVES OF PLEASURE AT SCEAUX ... 81 

Vm. THE TRAGIC END OF A LONG REIGN ... 91 

IX. THE king's will 100 

X. rivalries and conspiracies .... 109 

XI. HUMILIATION OF THE HOUSE OF MAINE . . 129 
Xn. THE FIRST YEARS OF THE REGENCY . . . 154 

Xm. AT THE BASTILLE 159 

XTV. LOVE AND TREACHERY WITHIN PRISON WALLS . 169 

XV. RELEASE OF THE SCEAUX CONSPIRATORS . .187 

XVI. EVENTFUL YEARS — 1720-1730 .... 197 

XVII. VAJSflTAS, VANITATUM 204 

XVUr. MADAME DU MAINE AS A MATRIMONIAL AGENT . 216 

XIX. THE LATER COURT OF SCEAUX .... 225 

XX. THE CLOSE OF AN EVENTFUL LIFE . . . 242 

INDEX 255 



Xlll 



LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS 



HENRI JULES DE BOURBON, PRINCE DE cond:^ Frontispiece 

MADAME DE STAAL-DELAUNAY . . . To fuce p. 16 



ANNE LOUISE DE C0ND:iS, DUCHESSE DU MAINE 

LE DUG DU MAINE ET MADAME DE MONTESPAN 

MADAME EILLON \ 

MICHEL, BARON OE THE COMEDIE ERANQAISEJ 

MADEMOISELLE d'ORLI^ANS, DAUGHTER OP THE 
REGENT PHILIPPE d'ORLEANS . 

PERE LE TELLIER 

ADELAIDE DE SAVOIB, DUCHESSE DE BOUR 
GOGNE 



DUG DE BOURGOGNE .... 

LOUIS DE BOURBON, COMTE DE TOULOUSE 
GUILLAUME, CARDINAL DUBOIS 
PHILIPPE, DUC D 'ORLEANS. REGENT : 1715 

1723 

ARMAND DU PLESSIS, DUC DE RICHELIEU 
MADAME DU CHATELET .... 



40 

48 

56 

64 
92 

96 

102 
144 

160 

182 
208 



XV 



RIVAL FRENCH COURTS 

CHAPTER I 

AT THE CONVENT OF SAINT- SAUVEUR 

In the year 1684 an obscure French artist 
named Cordier Delaunay emigrated to England, in 
the hope of finding there the sustenance, if not 
the fame, which his work had not brought him in 
France. His efforts did not meet with success ; 
he was never able to send for the young wife 
whom he had left behind him in Paris, but in 
that same year, 1684, his name was rescued 
from oblivion through the birth of his second 
daughter, the future Madame de Staal Delaunay. 
Her charming Memoirs, in which that most 
modern element, the power not to take one's 
self too seriously, mixes so naturally with 
eighteenth - century sensibility, are among the 
most refreshing documents of a century famous 
for picturesque contrasts. 

The first years of little Mademoiselle Delaunay 
were spent at the convent of Saint - Sauveur 
d'Evreux in Normandy, where, through the 



2 AT THE CONVENT OF SAINT-SAUVEUR 

introduction of some influential friends, her 
mother had been admitted as a non-paying 
da7ne pensionnaire. The abbess, Madame de 
la Rochefoucauld, was a sister of the famous 
Due de la Rochefoucauld, author of the 
pessimistic " Maximes," and the fact that the 
abbess was an exclusive lover of dogs may be 
taken as an indication that she shared in some 
measure her brother's misanthropy. She had 
made of her apartment a home for homeless 
dogs. The lame, the blind, the weak, the aged 
filled it with whinings and with barkings, and 
with deep canine sighs of contentment and 
resignation ; the place was theirs, and human 
invaders were warned to tread cautiously, for 
fear of infringing upon superior rights. 

The child, who had found a shelter in the 
convent too, had lived there two years with her 
mother, and was four years old before her baby 
helplessness had been allowed to come into collision 
with lame paws and battered tails. In consequence 
the abbess hardly knew her, at a time when the 
other religieuses were already her devoted slaves. 
It happened then that one day she was asked 
with her mother to dine in Madame de la 
Rochefoucauld's apartment. 

Very carefully, with serious baby intensity, she 
steered through the dangers against which she had 
been warned, when lo ! there was a loud howl, and 



CHILDHOOD 3 

the abbess' face assumed an expression of awe- 
inspiring sternness. The little girl stopped short, 
very much frightened, and some one whispered in 
her ear " II faut demander pardon." With childish 
equity, the offender walked straight to the offended 
— dog though he was — and asked his pardon 
in regretful, well- chosen language. Everybody 
laughed ; she was already famous all through the 
convent for her wonderful choice of words, this 
little four-year old pleader, but the abbess had 
never noticed it before ; this time she loved her 
for it and remained her friend from that day 
onward. 

The child had need of friends indeed. Very 
soon her mother had to leave her, in order to accept 
the post of governess to the Duchesse de Venta- 
dour's daughter, and shortly after Monsieur Cordier 
Delaunay died in England. His little daughter 
had never seen him, and her later comment on her 
childish grief at the news of his death does not 
sound emotional. " Je ne me souviens plus d'ou 
mes larmes partirent," she says in her Memoirs. 

Madame de la Rochefoucauld proved a very 
good friend to the little orphan ; but better friends 
still were two ladies then staying at the convent, 
Mesdames de Grieu, whose affection seemed to 
have amounted to extravagant devotion. " They 
were unoccupied," as Madame de Staal Delaunay 
explains in her Memoirs, analysing the situation 



4 AT THE CONVENT OF SAINT-SAUVEUR 

with her customary balance, " and loved me with 
the vehemence which solitude and listlessness are 
apt to give to all feelings." Madame de Grieu, 
former abbess of Saint-Jouarre, and her sister were 
awaiting in the convent of Saint Sauveur the issue 
of the quarrel between Louis XIV. and the Holy 
See, concerning the right of nominating abbesses 
for the " Urbanist " convents. The quarrel lasted 
long, and when at last, after five years, Madame 
de Grieu took possession of the convent of Saint 
Louis in Rouen, she adopted the child who 
had filled with interest the empty days of her 
interregnum. 

At Saint Louis, little Mademoiselle Delaunay 
held absolute sway : she lived in the abbess' private 
apartments ; four nuns, and with them Madame de 
Grieu's unwilling nieces, were bidden to wait upon 
her, and a pension which the abbess derived from 
private sources was spent almost exclusively on 
the child's education, entrusted to numerous and 
expensive tutors. As they passed in and out of 
the convent gates, these masters, who were part of 
the luxury lavished upon the abbess' protegee, 
were no doubt followed by many a disapproving 
glance and gesture of the good nuns ; but they 
must have been immensely gratified with their 
pupil, who, at the age of thirteen, studied " passion- 
ately " the philosophy of Descartes and " amused " 
herself by anticipating his deductions, in order to 



THE FIRST LITERARY SUCCESS 5 

ascertain whether she had rightly grasped his 
meaning ! 

She soon had an opportunity of putting her 
dialectical talents to a practical use, and that in 
the defence of Madame de Grieu's interests against 
those of a rival abbess, nominated to Saint Louis 
by the Archbishop of Rouen. Madame de Grieu 
was then in a very difficult position : the murmurs 
of the gossiping nuns had swelled to the pro- 
portions of a rebellion, and the abbess was accused 
of spending the revenues of the convent on her 
nieces and her adopted daughter. 

There were no grounds for this accusation ; the 
convent of Saint Louis was wretchedly poor, and 
even the wisest of administrations had failed to 
raise it to a state of prosperity, but not one sou 
of its revenues had been put to private or illegal 
use. Unable to prove her integrity, but deter- 
mined to stand her ground, the abbess at last 
proposed to give up the temporal administration 
of the convent and the living which she herself 
derived from it, undertaking to depend entirely 
on her private income. 

Many negotiations were necessary to arrive at 

a satisfactory agreement, and when this was reached 

at last, the legal advisers of the abbess were obliged 

to own that the most conclusive arguments in the 

case had come from the pen of a girl of fourteen — 

little Mademoiselle Delaunay. Her talents had, 

a2 



6 AT THE CONVENT OF SAINT-SAUVEUR 

by this time, won her more than mere technical 
admiration. The Memoirs mention among others 
a certain Monsieur Brunei who besieged her with 
love sonnets, which, however, seem to have made 
very little impression upon the recipient, and which 
certainly remained unanswered. In spite of rebuffs, 
and driven by an infatuation which thirsted to 
communicate itself, Brunei introduced to her a 
friend who speedily became a rival. It was a 
certain Abbe de Vertot, an impecunious and 
enthusiastic bookworm, the terror of all book- 
sellers, whose books he thumbed rapturously from 
morning till night, without ever being able to buy 
them. The books now profited by his being in 
love ; but not so the booksellers, for their ears 
rang with the praises of Mademoiselle Delaunay's 
genius and charms, while the books lay unheeded 
on the counter. It may have been during one of 
these rhapsodical but one-sided conversations that 
the famous Monsieur de Fontenelle, staying at 
Rouen for a few days, pushed open the door of the 
bookshop, and, after listening for a while in his usual 
deliberate manner, decided that Madame de Grieu's 
young p7'otegee must be worth knowing. At any 
rate his voice joins the chorus of her praises 
about that time, and no weightier admiration 
could have been won than that of the feted author 
of " La Pluralite des Mondes." Mademoiselle 
Delaunay does not, however, seem to have attached 



A SLACKENING ESCORT 7 

much importance to the tribute of his apprecia- 
tion ; she was then very interested in some friends 
who Hved near the convent gates, and to whom she 
paid daily visits, very interested also in a relative 
of theirs, a Monsieur de Rey, who, after each visit, 
never failed to offer her his hand to escort her 
back to Saint Louis. The length and breadth of 
a public square lay between the house in question 
and the convent gates, and as Monsieur de Rey 
and Mademoiselle Delaunay sauntered through it 
observant onlookers might have noticed that at 
first they skirted the outer edge of the square, 
lengthening the road to the utmost. As the days 
went by, however, the couple steered more and 
more towards the diagonal crossing line, until at 
last the convent gates were reached with astonish- 
ing alacrity. " Calculate the quantitative difference 
between a ' square ' and a ' diagonal ' affection" — 
Mademoiselle Delaunay set herself that problem 
which she had helped to illustrate, and shed no 
tears over its solution ! 



CHAPTER II 

THE MARQUIS DE SILLY 

A CONVENT, in spite of its liberal attitude of 
two hundred years ago, would hardly seem the 
best possible school wherein to gain a knowledge 
of love, but Mademoiselle Delaunay's natural 
understanding of its laws and vagaries developed 
quite independently of her surroundings. 

Of the vague stirrings of her young imagina- 
tion before she meets the man whom she will 
love passionately to the end, she tells in a 
charming tone of amused detachment ; and here 
and there, shining like little crystal drops of 
wisdom, are reflections which, collected and 
classified, would make an excellent "guide to 
love." " The heart hardly ever fails to rebel against 
any demands which it could not reciprocate" is 
her summing up of the hesitations and rejections 
awakened in her by the courtship of Monsieur 
Brunei. He was, as she describes him 

" a man of exquisite discernment, possessed of 
much knowledge, yet lacking in those graces 

8 



NEW SOCIAL INTERESTS 9 

which are only acquired in society, and which 
please more readily than do more sterling advan- 
tages. It interested me," she owns a little later 
on, "to unravel his real thoughts and feelings 
about me, but if he expressed them too clearly 
and seemed to expect some return, I felt a great 
distaste for him." 

The first time she met a man of really polished 
manners, the social instinct in her leapt up and 
exulted, and she imagined that her heart was 
touched. It happened in an old Normandy 
chateau, very lonely and dull, where she was 
visiting a young convent friend. 

" I had only met there a few country squires," 
she says, "who had not at all attracted my 
attention, when the chevalier d'Herb . . . came 
to call. He was asked to join in a game of 
cards, after which he went away, promising to 
return for a longer visit a little later." 

Meanwhile Mademoiselle Delaunay made a 
discovery which seemed rather perturbing to her. 

" I discovered," she continues, " that I desired 
his return ; I thought over the reasons which I 
could have for that and finally explained to myself 
that he was a witty man, a man with social clever- 
ness whose company one must naturally desire in a 
place as lonely as this was. Then, on examining 
more closely upon what I had based my opinion of 
his wit, and on trying to remember what I had 
heard him say, the only words of his which I could 



10 THE MARQUIS DE SILLY 

recall were 'gano, trois matadors' — and 'sans 
prendre.' " 

After that she was perhaps not quite unprepared 
for the disillusion which was to follow, and she 
closes the episode by remarking quite cheerfully : 
*'When he came back and spoke at greater 
length, the wit with which I had endowed him 
so gratuitously vanished entirely." 

It was at that same chateau, the Chateau de 
Silly in Normandy, that she met the man who 
was to colour and control the whole of her 
emotional life. The young Marquis de Silly was 
not at the chateau when Mademoiselle Delaunay 
first stayed there as the guest of his sister, but 
he was rarely absent from their conversations. 
His extreme selfishness had in fact a rare power 
of creating in others a total absorption in his 
interests ; but of this the ardent young girl, 
ready for worship and seeking it, could know 
nothing yet. Besides, recent circumstances had 
contributed to lend still more interest to his 
personality. He was a soldier ; he had fought 
bravely, had been taken prisoner at the battle 
of Hochstadt * and sent to England. There he had 
remained for some time, but, 

"owing to the climate of that country," as 
Mademoiselle Delaunay reports, "he had been 
threatened with consumption, and had obtained 

* Better known as the battle of Blenheim, 13th August 1704. 



FIRST LOVE 11 

leave to return to France on his parole ; the 
Paris doctors had advised him to go to Normandy 
to breathe his native air. Monsieur de Silly had 
spent his life in the best society and on a very 
agreeable footing. I had heard so much about 
him that I w^as very impatient to make his 
acquaintance." 

However, Mademoiselle Delaunay had to wait 
till the return of the summer, for Monsieur de Silly 
could not be expected to endure the dullness of 
a winter in the country ! The wished-for day 
arrived at last, and she went back to Silly full 
of anticipations. 

"The son of the house was expected," she 
writes, "and all were already full of him. He 
arrived ; everybody went to meet him. I went 
like every one else, but with a little less pre- 
cipitation, and when I arrived upon the scene, he 
was already going up the stairs to his apartments. 
He turned round to give some orders. I was 
struck by the charm of his expression, and by a 
certain nobility in his bearing which made him 
look different from any one I had seen before." 

From that ineffaceable moment her love for 
Monsieur de Silly was to remain the strongest 
element in her life, and his indifference was but 
to strengthen her passion. 

" He did not invite conversation from any 
one," she adds, "and sought little intercourse at 



12 THE MARQUIS DE SILLY 

first. Some books which he had brought with 
him afforded him companionship, and except at 
meals, he was rarely seen. But although he 
seldom took the trouble to speak, he spoke so 
well and with so much grace that his wit shone 
in spite of himself." 

After this note of infatuation we are glad to 
find some natural feeling of pique. 

"His charms and his disdain stung me to 
the quick, and his sister who had seen him 
more sociable was hardly less hurt by it than 
I was ; this formed the constant subject of our 
conversations. ..." 

And then we hear that one fine day this 
very disdainful young hero, wandering through 
a wood, happened to overhear his name and 
deigned to stop and listen. Behind a hawthorn 
bush two young girls were hotly discussing a 
subject of paramount importance to himself — his 
own personality. He listened to all they said — 
this time his interest was fettered ; and then he 
stole back quietly to the house, awaited their 
return, and told them that he had overheard a 
conversation, that it had been about himself — 
"qu'on en avait dit beaucoup de mal, et que ce 
n'etait pas en riant. On n'a pas envie de rire, lui 
dis-je, quand on se plaint de vous. ..." O charm- 
ing mixture of flattery and bold sincerity ! — 
did Monsieur de Silly appreciate the tone as 



"ABSOLUTE HAPPINESS" 13 

much as the preoccupation with his character? 
Be that as it may, henceforth he seemed to 
find these two neghgeable young women worthy 
of his society, and Mademoiselle Delaunay had 
the "joy to see continually some one whose 
presence was sufficient in itself to cause absolute 
happiness." 

The whole atmosphere of the house favoured 
the expansion of her feelings. 

" It was so much in the air," she says, " to be 
wholly absorbed in him, that I could follow my 
inclination to it, without making myself con- 
spicuous. However, my actions were sometimes 
so marked, in spite of myself, that they could 
not fail to carry conviction. One day, for instance, 
I had given him a purse which had just been 
sent to me from my convent, and he threw 
his own into the hands of one of his mother's 
maids who was not among the least of his 
admirers. Whether I wanted to have that purse 
or merely wanted to prevent the other from having 
it, I caught it in the air before it reached its 
destination, and that in the presence of the 
old Marquise de Silly, a very grave and stern 
woman. ..." 

Thus Mademoiselle Delaunay gloried, woman- 
like, in throwing all prudence to the winds, as a 
small tribute to her love. Monsieur de Silly, on the 
other hand, exercised all that male caution which 
is so conspicuous whenever passion has not been 



14 THE MARQUIS DE SILLY 

roused. The Memoirs strike a little note of irony 
on that subject. 

"The fear of giving me an opportunity to 
explain myself made Monsieur de Silly very 
careful not to remain alone v^^ith me. I was 
very determined, on my part, not to say any- 
thing to him ; yet I desired passionately that 
meeting which he avoided so studiously, and 
when I had fully understood the reason of his 
circumspection, I wished even more fervently to 
have with him some private conversation which 
would reassure him and make him understand 
how far I was from forgetting what I owed to 
myself." 

After that charming little outburst of youthful 
dignity, she tells, with a smile of humorous retro- 
spection, how the interview came to pass. 

" One day, as we were starting out for our 
usual walk. Mademoiselle de Silly, not feeling 
very well, decided to remain at home. The old 
Marquise, anxious to provide entertainment for 
her son, asked me to go with him. We walked 
as far as a big meadow, some distance away. 
He was walking without speaking, much more 
embarrassed than I was ; this little triumph gave 
me courage to speak, and I remarked upon the 
beauty of the fields ; — but this topic not seeming 
yet distant enough from the subject I wished to 
avoid, I left mere earth for the heavens, soared 
across the entire planet system and firmly did 1 



PAINS OF JEALOUSY 15 

hold my ground in those transcendental regions, 
until we got back to the chateau." 

It was a small triumph, but her first taste of the 
"bitter-sweet herb of self-mastery" ; and after long 
years had passed, she still remembered the austere 
joy with which it had filled her young soul. " I 
experienced," she says, "that delicious exultation 
which is unknown to those who cannot master 
the impulses of their heart." 

There were less exalted moments to recall 
also : she saw Monsieur de Silly flirt with rivals, 
and she was outrageously jealous. One of these 
rivals had over her the advantage of having 
travelled in England and in Germany, and thus, 
being a woman with whom a man of the world could 
compare experiences ! Mademoiselle Delaunay 
resented this bitterly, but to hide her jealousy 
she made exaggerated advances to her rival ; 
she made all the mistakes which a woman 
of her temperament and of her inexperience 
would have made, but she never attempted 
to pull her hero down to her own erring 
level by owning to any imperfections in his 
conduct ! 

And then the end of her visit to Silly drew 
near, and shortly before that the departure of 
the young Marquis, heralded by the arrival of 
mysterious letters and packets which caused many 
secret conferences between mother and son, and 



16 THE MARQUIS DE SILLY 

great heart-burnings to the young girl who was 
excluded from the conversations. 

"I perceived," she writes, "that something 
which was of great importance to him was being 
discussed, and that he meant to say nothing of 
it to me. This seemed to me an insult ; I no 
longer spoke to him, and hardly answered when 
he spoke to me. He noticed my displeasure, 
without understanding the reason of it, and as 
he felt real friendship for me, he wished to clear 
up matters and to appease me. He stopped me, 
therefore, one day, when I was about to enter 
the Marquise de Silly's apartment. I was crossing 
very hurriedly a hall in which he was wandering 
^bout aimlessly, and I pretended not to see him ; 
but he came up to me, stopped me, and made 
me sit down by his side, saying that he wished 
to talk to me. He spoke with so much charm 
and feeling, made up so well for the lack of 
confidence which had offended me, appeared so 
touched by my grief, so flattered by its cause, 
that I never felt more satisfied with him, and 
more comforted about the power which he had 
gained over me." 

That unequal relation of rather flattered friend- 
ship on one side and of whole-hearted devotion 
on the other, never changed all through the long 
years of their intercourse, and in speaking of it 
Mademoiselle Delaunay never tried to give her- 
self the more interesting role of the one who is 




MADAME DE STAAL-DELAUNAY 
[Fi-o/n the painting by Mign'ARD) 



[ To face p. 1 5- 



THE FIRST PARTING 17 

sought for. The description of their first part- 
ing marks the contrast very sharply ; its abandon 
and ingenuous directness make of it a real little 
eighteenth- century vignette. 

"His departure, though there was nothing 
final about it, caused me great unhappiness, but 
I succeeded pretty well in saving appearances. 
When he said good-bye to us, Mademoiselle 
de Silly burst into tears, I hid mine from him, 
for in his eyes I could read more curiosity than 
emotion ; but when he had gone, I felt as if life 
itself had left me. My eyes, accustomed to seek 
him only, had no more desire to rest on anything ; 
I no more deigned to speak, since he could hear 
me no more ; it seemed to me that even thought 
had left me. ..." 

The Marquis de Silly went back to court, and 
the enchanted palace which he had left behind 
him turned straightway into a wilderness from 
which Mademoiselle Delaunay fled back to her 
convent. A letter from the Marquis reached her 
there shortly after, a letter which stirred her 
emotions so much that thirty years later she 
could still remember every feature of it. 

" The shape and the appearance of this letter," 
she writes, "have remained so clearly imprinted 
on my memory, that when I looked for it just 
now, in connection with what I am writing (for 
I have always kept it, as I have done with nearly 



18 THE MARQUIS DE SILLY 

all the letters which I have received from him) 
I detected it at once, among a thousand other 
letters." 

Yes, the hand has found it, the eye has 
detected it at once, the senses have remained in 
bondage, but the independent spirit adds its 
comment, piquant enough to be worth recording : 
"I am tempted to quote the letter here, in 
order that I may marvel at having been touched 
by a thing so little touching. ..." 

She quotes it in all its nakedness, and after 
having read it and some others which followed 
in the course of time, one is tempted in one's 
turn to ask wonderingly of what stuff were 
made these chains which bound Mademoiselle 
Delaunay for so long. The letters are very v^se, 
sufficiently witty, but selfish and cold to freezing 
point. Their recipient kept her eyes resolutely 
closed to this for a long time, and yet, as time 
passed, the selfishness of the letters increased 
steadily. When some years later Monsieur de 
Silly was in Germany, he made of her something 
between an errand boy and a weekly gazetteer. 
She owns it, with her usual sincerity. 

" His letters adopted by degrees the tone one 
takes with a business agent. I have received 
yours of the ...th instant, pray continue to inform 
me of what is taking place . . . you failed to 



AN UNAMIABLE PEDANT 19 

apprise me of such and such a thing . . . nothing 
more. In spite of this," she continues, "I was 
beside myself at the sight of his writing and of 
his seal. I awaited with the greatest impatience 
the day and the hour of their arrival, and I can 
well remember a quarrel I once had at Versailles 
with a courier who brought me one of his letters 
and would neither take my money nor give me 
my letter, because neither of us had any change. 
In vain I repeated to him that I did not care 
about the change, he insisted on going away with 
the letter, saying coldly, ' I will call again later 
on.' ' What is this ? ' said my room mate, waked 
up by the noise we were making, ' is not a letter 
as good at one time as at another ? ' She gave 
the few pence required, just to get us quiet, and 
wxnt to sleep again." 

Although Mademoiselle Delaunay's portrait of 
her hero would leave our mind quite unbiassed in 
his favour, it might be as well perhaps to hear 
other opinions about him. Grimm calls the 
Marquis de Silly " a pedant — and not amiable " ; 
Saint- Simon devotes to him a few pages of a 
peculiarly venomous character. He shows us the 
cold ambition which is the motive power of all his 
actions, his steady rise from dignity to dignity, 
and at last the bitter disappointment which so 
unhinges his mind that it drives him to suicide. 
Monsieur de Silly, after being a member of the 
Privy Council under the Regent's administration, 



go THE MARQUIS DE SILLY 

had hopes of entering upon a ministerial career, 
but at the eleventh hour his ambition was 
frustrated. Unable to bear this check which 
seemed to destroy the efforts of a lifetime, he 
threw himself from one of the windows in his 
Chateau de Silly and was killed. There is only 
one allusion to this in the Memoirs, and it is full 
of tenderness and of the wish to excuse and to 
explain. 

*' Ambition was the mainspring of his emotions," 
Mademoiselle Delaunay confesses, " and perhaps 
it has obscured his virtues, it was the reason of 
all his wrongs and the cause of his ruin ; yet in 
him ambition seemed less a wish to rise above 
others than a desire to take the place which was 
naturally due to him." 



CHAPTER III 

KNOCKING AT THE DOOR OF FORTUNE 

A GREAT misfortune befell Mademoiselle Delaunay 

just after she had reached her twenty - fourth 

birthday; it came so unexpectedly and so swiftly 

that the catastrophe was upon her before she 

had had time to face its inevitable consequences. 

Madame de Grieu fell dangerously ill, and died 

after a fortnight's illness. With their share of 

human perversity, her nuns regretted her as 

much after her death as they had tormented 

her during her lifetime, yet in spite of their 

tardy show of affection, they passed over the 

only practical way in which they could have 

testified to their devotion. 

Madame de Grieu's trusted sister, who had 

resided with her at Saint Louis, had considerable 

claims to the position of abbess ; but old intrigues 

were renewed, and one of the nuns who had 

once headed the rebellion was chosen for the 

vacant post. Under these circumstances it was 

impossible for Mademoiselle Delaunay and her 

benefactress to remain at Saint Louis. Madame 

21 b2 



S2 KNOCKING AT THE DOOR OF FORTUNE 

de Grieu's sister could have retired to the convent 
of Jouarre to which she belonged, but she would 
not abandon her niece and the young girl whom 
she loved as dearly as a daughter — and yet her 
small income was not sufficient for three people. 

During the days of anxious deliberations 
which followed many offers of help came to 
Mademoiselle Delaunay; and they prove that 
she must have understood the delicate process 
by which love is changed into friendship. 
Monsieur Brunei, in spite of many past rebuffs, 
besought her to accept a considerable sum of 
money, and the Abbe de Vertot, impecunious no 
more, as it seems, sent her from Paris a letter 
containing fifty pistoles. 

She returned the notes and refused the offers 
of money, determined to incur no obligations 
unless she saw a certain chance of redeeming 
them. Another offer was perhaps harder to 
refuse : it came from unknown quarters, and 
an imagination more open to compromise than 
Mademoiselle Delaunay's might have seen in 
it an effort at restitution made in memory 
of Madame de Grieu. It was transmitted 
through the Frere Maillard, who was then to 
the famous Pere La Chaise what the much 
discussed "Eminence grise" had been to Cardinal 
Richelieu. Less skilful, however, than his wily 
confrere, he did not know how to hide his credit 



AN ANONYMOUS KINDNESS 23 

with the king, and his exile to Rouen had been 
decided upon and announced before he realised 
his mistakes. 

It was a very innocent intrigue in which 
he was helping now ; he brought Mademoiselle 
Delaunay the necessary sum of money to pay 
for her residence at the convent for three months, 
and the assurance that the allowance would be 
continued indefinitely, on condition that the 
recipient would remain at Saint Louis. 

The anonymous giver was later discovered to 
be the Marquis de Silly, and the clause which 
stipulated residence at the convent might perhaps 
have betrayed the man who felt so strongly 
the desirability and the necessity of regulations 
and limitations ! The whole proceeding, however, 
in its delicate, impersonal generosity, certainly 
vindicates the character of the man whom former 
circumstances had somewhat belittled. A letter 
which he wrote to Mademoiselle Delaunay a little 
later, when she was staying with some acquaintances 
at a small hotel in Paris, is a model of excellent 
feeling and of youthful censoriousness : — 

" I hear that you are in Paris, Mademoiselle, 
and as I bear a great interest in all that concerns 
you, I learned with great pleasure the decision 
which you have taken." (Mademoiselle Delaunay 
was then endeavouring to obtain a post as 
governess). "You will perhaps be surprised to 



M KNOCKING AT THE DOOR OF FORTUNE 

find this letter full of precepts ; it is not generally 
my habit to give advice, still less to write it, but 
I count you one of my friends, and 1 feel that I 
ought to write to you in this vein. I think that 
with the aim you have in view, the shorter time you 
stay in furnished apartments, the better chance you 
will have of ultimate success. The house in which 
you are now is not one from which I should wish 
you to make your first acquaintance with Paris life. 

" I shall perhaps seem to moralize to excess, 
but I feel that, in your place, I should avoid 
any coquetry in dress. Your youth may be an 
obstacle to you, and it is in your interest to dis- 
simulate it. I should wish you, for the same 
reason, to exercise a little circumspection in the 
choice of your friends, and to be more desirous 
of a reputation for judgment than for wit. I beg 
you to make use of the simplest expressions only, 
and above all to dispense entirely with technical 
terms ; although they may be more expressive than 
others, do not, I pray you, yield to the temptation 
of using them. Finally, I should wish you to be 
occupied solely in establishing for yourself a solid 
reputation, without trying to please through charm 
and accomplishments. I fear, however, that my 
last precept may be opposed to nature ; the wish 
to please might be very natural to your sex, and 
without asking you to reverse the order of nature, 
let me beg of you to endeavour to please through 
simplicity only, and not through artifices. 

*' I have said enough, perhaps too much. Adieu, 
Mademoiselle. I beg you to be assured that you 
can confidently count on me most assuredly." 



EFFORTS AGAINST DISCOURAGEMENT 25 

This letter, less discerning perhaps than well- 
meant, did not altogether please the girl to whom 
it was addressed. Advice, however good, may be 
unreasonable, and although Mademoiselle Delaunay 
was grateful for the interest shown to her, she 
frankly protested against the necessity of so much 
cautioning. It is greatly to her credit, too, that 
she found the energy to retaliate, for the coldness 
of the outer world, after her sheltered retreat of 
Saint Louis, was a paralysing influence indeed. 
In her Memoirs she laughs retrospectively at the 
bitter surprises and startling disillusionments of 
these days. While Madame de Grieu and her 
nieces were staying with a relative who had not 
included her in his invitation, she was obliged to 
accept a very casually proffered hospitality at the 
country house of some acquaintances. Whilst 
there she one day had a bad migraine, and it 
did not revolutionise the whole household ! 

" Before then," she says, " my migraines had 
been enough to engage the attention of the whole 
convent, from the abbess to the lowest sceur 
servante ! Here they simply sent to ask whether 
I needed anything! I shall never forget my 
surprise in seeing treated so lightly what had 
before been attended by so much pomp." 

She made the last stage of her journey to Paris, 
where she was to join Madame de Grieu, in a 
company of which her self-instituted mentor 



26 KNOCKING AT THE DOOR OF FORTUNE 

would have disapproved very strongly. Her 
travelling companions, Mesdemoiselles de Neuville, 
had been pensionnaii^es at Saint Louis ; the eldest, 
a girl of eighteen, "extremely pretty, tolerably 
amiable, with no money and very little distinction," 
moreover a thorough adventuress by temperament, 
was secretly starting for Paris with her younger 
sister and a chaperone ; and, " women never having 
anything more pressing to do than to tell their 
secrets," she had confided to Mademoiselle 
Delaunay the object of her journey. It seems 
that an old Comte de Novion, while opposing her 
marriage with his son, had fallen in love with her 
himself. Of late, however, his ardent letters had 
been scarcer, and his fervour had cooled ominously. 
Mademoiselle de Neuville had therefore determined 
to take the matter into her own hands and to bring 
the pressure of her presence to bear upon future 
developments. Her enterprising spirit might well 
have been infectious, but it did not rouse exultant 
hope in her sober and rather sceptical companion. 
Mademoiselle Delaunay was starting out to seek 
her fortune too, but Paris frightened her, and 
she had nothing wherewith to coax its favours, 
except the limited resources of her mind and a very 
small sum of money, borrowed from a distant 
relative. 

For many days her intellectual accomplishments 
found no market ; in vain she peddled them from 



THREE MONTHS' RESPITE 27 

door to door, with her letters of introduction and 
her heavy heart. At last she had to fall back on 
the small funds she was keeping in reserve, and 
recklessly devoted all the money she possessed to 
the paying of three months' residence at the 
convent of the "Presentation," where Madame 
de Grieu and her niece had just been admitted 
as dames pensionnaires. She dared not look 
beyond this three months' respite, and when, 
towards the end of it, she fell dangerously ill, 
her one hope was that death might come as a 
welcome solution to an otherwise insoluble 
problem. But death did not come ; " one seldom 
dies a propos,'' she remarks, looking back on those 
days which were so utterly devoid of hope. 

The solution came from a most unexpected 
quarter. Mademoiselle Delaunay had in Paris an 
elder sister whom she hardly knew, and who was 
a waiting woman to the Duchesse de la Ferte. 
Pretty, naturally witty and graceful, she had won 
the Duchesse's special favour, and might have 
offered her help from the start, had she wished to 
do so. But she was jealous of a sister whom she 
had once, on a visit to Saint Louis, seen courted 
and adulated. She had broken off all relations 
with her, and only relented now that she saw her 
so utterly "fallen from her glory." She rushed in 
one morning on her convalescent sister, with all 
the eagerness and importance of a bearer of great 



28 KNOCKING AT THE DOOR OF FORTUNE 

news. On accompanying Madame de la Ferte to 
Versailles the day before, she had, it seems, told 
her of the existence of her younger sister, whom 
she had described as a creature of innumerable 
talents and fathomless knowledge. " Knowing 
nothing herself," says the modest object of these 
laudations, " she found small difficulty in believing 
that I knew everything. The Duchesse, who was 
no better informed, credited all she heard, and 
believed me to be a prodigy!" 

In so doing, Madame de la Ferte was only 
following her natural bent; she was famous for 
taking innumerable and unaccountable fancies, and 
no one attached much importance to the ecstasies 
into which her latest discoveries were wont to 
throw her. Her imagination, however, was not 
dependent on encouragement, and once more she 
had arrived at Versailles, full of a new interest, 
namely. Mademoiselle Delaunay ! She talked of 
"her prodigy" wherever she went, especially at 
her sister's, Madame de Ventadour, where she met 
the Cardinal Rohan, and "said a hundred more 
things than she had been told." 

Imagination is a kindling fire. By degrees the 
sceptical audience felt its glow, and, in spite of 
reluctant commonsense, was drawn by degrees 
into the magic ring of the Duchesse's fantasies. 
How could this newly discovered treasure be 
exploited ? What fields would be worthy of 



TO MAKE PRODIGIES 29 

Mademoiselle Delaunay's activities ? An eager 
discussion followed: if, as it was expected, the 
Dauphine should give birth to a child, and if that 
child should be a girl, who better than this 
"genius" could imbue the mind of the little 
Princess with all knowledge and all the sciences ? 
A splendid sphere of activity in truth, but 
rather distant still, it had to be owned, and 
so it was decided, at the Cardinal de Rohan's 
suggestion, that Mademoiselle Delaunay should 
enter the convent of Jouarre, where the Cardinal's 
three nieces were being educated, and that once 
there, she should " make prodigies of all three. . . ." 

Before the girl, who had just been staring into 
the black emptiness of despair, had had time to 
feel incredulous at these promised glories, she had 
been urged by her sister to dress immediately and 
to go and present her respects to the Duchesse, 
who was that very day going back to Versailles. 
There was a prosaic obstacle in the way : the 
future mentor of royal princesses had no seemly 
dress to wear, and was obliged to borrow one, 
just for two or three hours, from a pensionnaire 
at the convent. Thus attired in borrowed clothes, 
and feeling as uncomfortable in mind as she did 
in body, she started out with her sister. 

The Duchesse was just preparing to dress when 
they arrived ; she at once declared her future 
'protegee charming. " She was bound to do so, she 



30 KNOCKING AT THE DOOR OF FORTUNE 

owed it to her imagination," says Mademoiselle 
Delaunay, before proceeding to describe in her 
Memoirs the very characteristic scene which 
follows. 

"After a few simple and perhaps rather flat 
remarks which I made, 'Really,' she exclaimed, 
'Mademoiselle speaks entrancingly, and she has 
come just in time to write to Monsieur Desmarets 
a letter which I want him to receive at once. 
Here, Mademoiselle, they will give you some 
paper, you will only have to write ! ' ' Write 
what, Madame ? ' I rejoined, in some perturbation. 
'You will turn it just as you like,' she continued, 
' only it must be well expressed. I want him to 
grant me what I am asking.' ' But, Madame,' I 
objected, ' it would at least be necessary to know 
what you want to say to him ! ' ' No, no, you 
understand.' " 

From a few disconnected remarks, the impro- 
vised secretary at last succeeded in catching at a 
guiding thread, and very diffidently presented her 
production to the Duchesse. Great was its success. 
" This is exactly what I wanted to tell him," 
exclaimed Madame de la Ferte, " it is truly 
wonderful that she should have expressed my 
very thoughts ! Henriette, your sister is astonish- 
ing ; and since she writes so well, she must write 
another letter, to my lawyer now, it will be done 
by the time I am dressed." 



ON THE WAY TO VERSAILLES 31 

A torrent of explanations followed — facts, 
names, commentaries ; the writer was naturally 
perplexed, and made some confusion in the names. 
The Duchesse's criticism after reading this letter 
has a flavour quite its own : " The business is well 
stated," she remarked ; " but I cannot understand 
how a girl with so much wit could call my lawyer 
by the name of my attorney." "Thus," says 
the defaulter, "she discovered the limits of my 
genius ! Luckily it did not entirely rob me of 
her esteem." 

The interview came to an end at last ; the 
unwilling secretary heaved a sigh of relief, and 
the Duchesse had already stepped into the coach 
which was to take her to Versailles when a new 
idea occurred to her. " I think," she said to her 
protegee, " that I had better take you with me ; 
come in, come in. Mademoiselle, I will show 
you to Madame de Ventadour." With speechless 
dismay Mademoiselle Delaunay obeyed, and not 
the least of her anxieties was the thought of the 
dress which she had borrowed for two hours, 
and in which she seemed likely to be taken round 
the world ! 

The Duchesse was delighted with her plan. All 
the way to Versailles she talked with even more 
than her usual verve, and the girl, who felt very 
keenly the element of danger which lurked in 
her patroness' versatility, was yet fascinated, in 



32 KNOCKING AT THE DOOR OF FORTUNE 

spite of herself, by her absolute naturalness and 
her irresistible piquancy. Completely engrossed 
by her interest of the moment, Madame de la 
Ferte was making it yield its utmost. Was 
Mademoiselle Delaunay really acquainted with aU 
the sciences which her sister had enumerated? 
The Duchesse enumerated them herself, mispro- 
nouncing them for the most part, but with 
a warmth of tone which showed true regard, 
in spite of unfamiliarity. She would approach 
them all seriously some time or other, and 
with one of them at least she felt quite at 
ease ; she put it forward eagerly : *' As you are 
so learned. Mademoiselle," she said, "you will 
no doubt be able to tell me my horoscope; it 
is the thing which interests me most in the 
world." 

Great was her surprise on hearing that this 
profound science had been neglected by her 
interlocutor. 

" But," she exclaimed, " what was the object 
of studying so many other things, which are 
perfectly useless?" 

The arrival at the Duchesse's apartments in 
Versailles is somewhat of a revelation as to the 
kind of pied-a-terre with which the great nobles 
were satisfied when they followed the king to 
his favourite residence. Of the miraculous effect 
of true monarchic feeling on weary muscles and 



KNOCKING AT THE DOOR OF FORTUNE 33 

exhausted nerves, we hear a good deal in the 
Memoirs of the time. They have pencilled many 
a portrait of the perfect courtier, standing 
obsequiously for hours in the king's antechamber, 
first on one foot, then on the other, as much a 
part of the royal furniture as any of the gilded 
chairs along the walls, and with as little impetus 
to move away as they ; and still the case of 
Madame de la Ferte throws some sidelights of 
its own upon this subject. 

As a Duchesse, she was spared some, but by 
no means all, of the physical discomforts of Court 
life. To her, for instance, belonged by right of 
rank the privilege of the tabowet^ that divin 
tabouret as Madame de Sevigne calls it, for the 
sake of which one of her friends had married the 
ugliest man in the kingdom. But when the Court 
was at Versailles, Madame de la Ferte's tabouret 
dwelt dans les combles right under the roof, in 
the dark, garret-like rooms in which its owner 
herself resided. "It was so high up," says 
Mademoiselle Delaunay, "that if one of the 
servants had not carried me up the last flight 
of stairs, I should never have reached the 
top." 

She reached it, dazed in mind and exhausted 
in body; she was but convalescent yet, and her 
nerves were beginning to give way. For several 
hours she waited for some message from the 



34 KNOCKING AT THE DOOR OF FORTUNE 

Duchesse, who had gone straight to her sister's, 
Madame de Ventadour. No message came, how- 
ever, and she was only shaken out of her apathy 
by the stormy arrival of the Duchesse herself, who 
on her side had waited all afternoon to exhibit 
her new discovery, and whose indignation was 
only equalled by the impetuosity of her reproaches. 
No excuses could pacify her ! What had been a 
misunderstanding was to her a gross disregard of 
her commands ; Mademoiselle Delaunay's chances 
were mined, irretrievably lost ! 

The storm raged, ran its course, subsided, and 
was followed by smiling serenity. The loss of 
to-day, she promised herself, was to be com- 
pensated by the glories of to-morrow, and the 
morrow was filled to overflowing with over- 
whelming honours : a visit to Madame de 
Ventadour, to the Due de Bretagne, to the 
future Louis XV. — still a child in his cradle — an 
inspection of all the sights of Versailles, a never 
ceasing stream of newcomers, anxious to see the 
" prodigy whose reputation was already spreading I " 
Madame de la Ferte was filled with exultation, 
and at the souper du Roi to which she dragged 
her ''protegee "as a befitting end to so great a 
day, she insisted on calling the Due de Bourgogne's 
attention to her and her innumerable talents and 
accomplishments. 

This introduction to the great world of 



WIT WHILE YOU WAIT 36 

Versailles lasted five days. " I felt," says 
Mademoiselle Delaunay, "as if I were a monkey 
made to exhibit his tricks at a country fair." 
There are certain scenes in this little Versailles 
comedy which, as they appear in the " Memoires," 
might have been taken straight from the "Bour- 
geois Gentilhomme." Here is, for instance, an un- 
conscious parody of Monsieur Jourdain's childish 
delight in showing off the Turkish speech of his 
pseudo Turkish friend : 

"Madame de la Ferte," says Mademoiselle 
Delaunay, "having gone to the Duchesse de 
Noailles, bade me join her there. 1 arrived. 
*This is, Madame,' she said, 'the person of 
whom I have spoken to you, who is so 
witty and who knows so many things ; allons, 
Mademoiselle, speak ! Madame, you will see how 
well she speaks ! ' She saw me hesitate and, 
treating me like a singer who must execute a 
little prelude in order to clear her voice, and to 
whom one proposes, for that purpose, a theme 
which one would like to hear. ' First speak a 
little about religion,' she said to me, 'after that 
you will talk of something else ! ' My confusion 
was such that it defies description, and I cannot 
even remember how I extricated myself from 
this difficulty!" 

In spite of so many efforts, the brilliant results 
pictured by Madame de la Ferte's imagination 
were not forthcoming. Versailles saw, listened, 



36 KNOCKING AT THE DOOR OF FORTUNE 

commented, and passed on to other interests. 
The Duchesse was full of indignation, especially 
against her sister and the Cardinal de Rohan, 
who had woven the first shimmering threads of 
that golden vision, the education of the Dauphine's 
problematic daughter. Now, no one even pro- 
posed to pay the " pension " necessary for 
Mademoiselle Delaunay's admittance into the 
convent of Jouarre, where the Cardinal's three 
nieces were waiting in vain to be "turned into 
masterpieces ! " 

On the evening of her fifth day in Versailles, 
Madame de la Ferte returned to her apartments 
in a fine fury against her unappreciative friends. 
" Eh bien ! " she said, speaking to Henriette 
Delaunay, "since they want so much pressing, I 
shall do without them ; 1 am myself in a position 
to make her fortune. I shall take her into my 
own household; she will be better off with me 
than anywhere else." 

" This was just what I feared," comments 
Mademoiselle Delaunay. " I remained speechless 
and motionless, unable to make up my mind to 
acquiesce either by word or gesture ; luckily she 
was too excited herself to notice my impassibility." 

The few days which the discriminating young 
girl had spent with the whimsical, inconsequent 
women had been sufficient to make her feel the 
danger of the favours held out to her. She had 



CHEATING THE ROBBERS 37 

learned the number of rivals already existing in 
the Duchesse's household ; she knew that besides 
her sister, whose jealousy she was naturally 
unwilling to rouse, there was a certain Louison 
who had been raised from the position of waiting 
woman to that of a confidente, and also a Sylvine, 
belle covime le jou7% a young peasant girl whom 
Madame de la Ferte had picked up in the fields 
on one of her estates. " She idolised this nymph, 
and spared no money to enhance her charms and 
to cultivate her talents, chief among which was an 
admirable voice. These fancies were forsaken one 
after the other, in fact their fate was as inevitable 
as that of Circe's lovers." 

Even the greatest judiciousness would have 
been of no avail in such a whirlpool of unexpected 
happenings. No one could calculate the Duchesse's 
movements, and her unconventionality, though 
undoubtedly refreshing, was apt to be disconcert- 
ing at times. At her country house, for instance, 
she would assemble round a table not only her 
maids and valets, but also her purveyors, butchers, 
bakers, grocers, and play cards with them. " I 
cheat them," she would whisper delightedly into 
the ear of one of her house guests, " but then 
they rob me ! " 

Gourmets were wise in exercising circum- 
spection towards her invitations, for unpleasant 

surprises might be in store for them. Her 

c 2 



38 KNOCKING AT THE DOOR OF FORTUNE 

country-house guests once fared very indifferently, 
as at the last moment she had refused to take 
her cook with her. That presumptuous individual 
had asked her for new spits. " Always new spits ! " 
she had exclaimed, "this is the way in which 
great houses are ruined. The Marechal de la 
Ferte spent twelve hundred thousand francs on 
spits. No ! rather than give in, I will eat my 
porter's food." And she did, and her unfortunate 
guests shared it with her, only they had not, to 
sustain them, the uplifted feeling which comes 
to those who do great deeds of justice ! 



CHAPTER IV 

THE DUG AND DUCHESSE DU MAINE 

Mademoiselle Delaunay begged to be allowed 
some time to consider the proposition of her 
erratic patroness, though the latter had been 
drawing a very tempting picture of the things 
which were to be : a private apartment at her 
Paris residence, where Mademoiselle Delaunay 
was to be entirely her own mistress, one of the 
ducal carriages always at her disposal, and, above 
all, no compulsion of any kind. This Elyseum was, 
however, not quite ready ; the private apartment, 
for instance, had yet to be built, but this circum- 
stance was quite a negligeable one to a mind 
like Madame de la Ferte's. 

After her disappointment at the undiscerning 
attitude of Versailles, the Duchesse had expressed 
the decision to go back to Paris immediately, and 
Mademoiselle Delaunay was thinking with long- 
ing of the peaceful retreat at " I^a Presentation " 
to which she would return at last, when Madame 
de la Ferte suddenly changed her mind again. 

She would go on to Sceaux and show her 

39 



40 THE DUG AND DUCHESSE DU MAINE 

protegee to the Duchesse du Maine, the " queen " 
of Versailles' rival court. 

Mademoiselle Delaunay knew the Duchesse du 
Maine by reputation ; there could hardly have been 
any one in France, however slightly acquainted 
with court Society, who did not know the " Queen 
of Sceaux," the one woman who had dared to 
shake off the heavy yoke of Versailles, to seek 
pleasure in her own way, and to achieve power 
by her own methods. 

Her unconquerable individuality and prodigious 
energy were racial traits, as were also her wilfulness 
and her predisposition to eccentricity. Anne 
Louise Benedicte de Conde, Duchesse du Maine, 
was the granddaughter of that famous Conde 
who had led the armies of France and used his 
indomitable courage, his boundless energy, and 
reckless impetuosity now for, now against, his 
king, but who, in spite of many errings, has gone 
down to posterity as " le grand Conde." 

His son, Henri-Jules de Bourbon, the Duchesse's 
father, had inherited his seething vitality and 
turbulent ambition ; but the only healthy field 
for the development of his energies being denied 
him in consequence of a natural distaste for war, 
his activities degenerated into active eccentricities, 
and his ambition to govern into household tyranny. 
His wife, a Bavarian princess, reduced by fear to 
a meek and passive Griselda, endeavoured with 




ANNE LOUISE DE CONDE, 
DucHESSE Du Maine. 



To face />. ^o. 



MAGNIFICENCE AT CHANTILLY 41 

shaking limbs and ever perturbed mind to obey 
her master's whims. To anticipate them would 
have been impossible : unexpectedness was the 
very essence of the Prince's decision ; and the 
entire household was at the mercy of his vagaries. 
No trust could be placed in the stability of even 
the most elementary time - sanctioned household 
rites, and Henri-Jules de Bourbon's family never 
knew where or when they would dine. If, for 
instance, dinner had been ordered at Chantilly, 
Monsieur le Prince would at the last moment 
decide that he could only dine at his Paris 
residence ; but hardly had the lumbering coach 
conveying the family to the capital, reached the 
end of the avenue, when postilions, coachman, 
and coach would have to turn back, as dinner 
in Paris seemed impossible. 

" Monsieur le Prince," says the luxury-loving 
Due de Saint-Simon, "was most magnificent in 
his liberalities." Magnificence was one of the 
enduring traditions of Chantilly ; its majestic 
proportions, imposing terraces, and stately gardens 
proclaimed it equal to any royal residence. The 
Condes received regally and entertained lavishly 
the King and a retinue of several hundreds of 
courtiers, and once when through untoward circum- 
stances something had happened which threw dis- 
credit on the perfection of all appointments, their 
chief steward Vatel, deeming his honour lost, had 



42 THE DUG AND DUCHESSE DU MAINE 

not hesitated to take his own hfe. Monsieur le 
Prince remembered it well: the tardy arrival of 
the fish ordered for the royal tables on Good 
Friday morning, the hurried search for Vatel, the 
discovery of his desperate deed. There is an echo 
of all this in one of Madame de Sevigne's letters, 
of the impression it made on host and guests, on 
the sensitive opinion of Paris ever ready to extol 
or to blame, of the effect on Monsieur le Prince, 
on Monsieur le Due, whom the episode stamps 
for ever with a little touch of ridicule. "They 
blamed and they praised his courage, . . . Monsieur 
le Prince was in despair. . . . Monsieur le Due 
cried, he had counted entirely on Vatel for the 
comforts of his journey to Burgundy. . . ." 

Now that Henri-Jules was head of the house 
of Conde his liberalities were often as useless as 
they were extravagant. To ensure comfort for 
his gallantries, for instance, he bought the whole 
of one side of a Paris street, had a communica- 
tion established between all the houses, and 
furnished them with the greatest luxury. His 
mind, inclined at all times to deviate from the 
straight road of commonsense, sometimes lost 
its bearings altogether, especially during the latter 
part of his life. During these excesses he used 
to fancy himself a hound, and pursued with his 
barkings some imaginary deer. Even the awe- 
inspiring presence of the King could not dispel 



THE CHIEF OF THE CONDES 43 

his idee -fixe. Out of respect for the august 
presence he would then desist from his *• roarings," 
but his mouth continued to open and close 
mechanically in voiceless yapping. 

Another of his fancies might have proved fatal 
to himself; he would at times declare that he was 
dead, and very logically refuse to eat. Luckily 
his logic was as easily swayed as that of any 
opportunist. One of his physicians, a resourceful 
man, assured him at those times that, although 
the dead do not eat as a rule, he knew of some 
who did, adding that his Serene Highness would 
do well to dine with them. The Prince generally 
consented quite readily to join the more convivial 
of the departed spirits, and a sumptuous table was 
laid for them. The physician, usually present at 
these " agapes " of a new kind, published later on 
some of the strange conversations he had heard, 
and alluding light-heartedly to the famous work 
written by Fenelon for the Due de Bourgogne, 
he used to say that he also had published his 
" Dialogues des Morts." 

The even-mannered, well-regulated Bavarian 
Princess, whom Madame de Maintenon calls in one 
of her letters " la vertue memej' seems to have had 
as little part in the making of her children's 
temperament as in the ruling of her house. The 
Bourbon joie de vivre transmitted straight to them 
from their jovial ancestor Henry I V» was in all 



44 THE DUG AND DUCHESSE DU MAINE 

these Condes. The brother of the Duchesse du 
Maine, Monsieur le Due, worthy son of his father, 
and with the same taste for expensive privacy in 
his affaires de cceur, ordered to be built for his 
mistress, the beautiful Madame de Prie, a coach 
painted grey on the outside to look like a hackney 
coach, the inside of which, however, was lined with 
velvet and brocade, and embossed with solid gold. 
The history of the alliances of the Condes in 
that generation is an illustration of a royal measure 
which had raised the most violent criticism at the 
Court. .A few years before Anne Louise Benedicte 
became Duchesse du Maine, Monsieur le Due, her 
brother, had been compelled to marry Mademoiselle 
de Nantes, the King's illegitimate daughter by 
Madame de Montespan. Never was Louis XIV.'s 
stupendous tyranny over all the royal family 
exercised more autocratically than in this vexed 
question of the marriages of his bastards. Re- 
luctance, indignation, rebellion, where there was 
courage for rebellion, were of no avail, and princes 
of the blood had to obey without reward, where 
noblemen were bribed by heavy prices. During 
the latter part of his reign the King seems to have 
found a peculiar pleasure in ignoring all rules of 
decency in this matter, and in flaunting before the 
eyes of all Europe the scandalous alliances between 
his legitimate and his illegitimate descendants. 
Even the Due d'Orleans, future Regent of France, 



"A LITTLE TIMID MOLE" 45 

who stood so near the throne that, at one time, 
he all but felt the magic touch of the crown within 
his grasp, had been forced to accept as his wife 
the illegitimate Mademoiselle de Blois. 

Convention has decided that in the husband's 
power lies the subtle virtue of changing the caste 
of the woman he weds. No such occult trans- 
formation, however, could excuse and glorify the 
marriage of the Duchesse du Maine, and the 
alliance of the proud daughter of the Condes with 
the puny, lame son of Madame de Montespan had 
roused very active comments. The Due du Maine 
had no personal magnetism, no outward fascination 
wherewith to win public favour. Nature had not 
cut him out for a hero, and it is difficult even to 
conjure up his shifty, shadowy personality ; but the 
best silhouette of him, perhaps, is that drawn by 
Saint - Simon's masterpen, though it is partly 
dictated by personal spite. " The Due du Maine," 
he says, " was a little timid mole, excessively clever 
and cunning in reaching his goal through under- 
ground passages, but blind and groping above 
ground, shrinking and ineffective." His un- 
conquerable timidity, was partly the result of his 
deformity which, from his childhood onward, had 
made him shun public notice ; and yet he had 
been, in a manner, an infant prodigy, whose writings 
were handed round to a circle of intellectual con- 
noisseurs, and who, at the age of seven, had seriously 



46 THE DUG AND DUCHESSE DU MAINE 

been proposed by a fawning courtier for a vacant 
seat at the Academy I 

He had been Madame de Maintenon's favourite 
pupil, and her love for him bordered on idolatry. 

" Monsieur le Due du Maine is ill," she writes, 
in 1674 to the Abbe Gobelin, her confessor, "... 
it is a terrible thing to see loved ones suffer. 
I feel, with excessive grief, that I do not love 
this child less than I loved the other ,^ and this 
weakness on my part caused me to weep all 
through Mass ; nothing is more foolish than to love 
to such excess a child who is not mine, and over 
whose future I shall never have any influence." 

The delicate child's frequent illnesses seem 
to be an ever-recurring refrain in Madame de 
Maintenon's letters. " Monsieur le Due du Maine 
a la fievre quarte." ..." Monsieur le Due du 
Maine a la fievre double quarte." Nothing that 
devotion could suggest was omitted on her 
part to strengthen the child's weak constitution ; 
she took him to the wonder-working waters of 
Barege in the Pyrennees, she even went secretly 
with him to Holland, to consult a certain famous 
quack doctor who was supposed to effect 
miraculous cures. The quack did his best, 
pulled the shorter leg of his little patient with 
confident vigour, but when Madame de Maintenon 
brought her little charge back to France, the 
^ Madame de Moutespan's first child who died in 1672. 



DEVOTED PARTISANSHIP 47 

short leg was longer than the normal one, and 
the limping had only changed sides. 

The tenderness which had watched over the 
childhood of the Due du Maine, merged by 
degrees into the devoted partisanship which 
sought by all possible means to strengthen his 
position at Court. No doubt it was not love un- 
alloyed which prompted Madame de Maintenon's 
efforts ; ambition lurked in the background, and 
also hatred against the Due d'Orleans and his 
faction, a hatred ever ready to foster the King's 
natural distrust of his nephew, but though mixed 
with baser passions, her feeling had all the force 
which removes mountains. Her power of persuasion 
certainly had been strongest in overcoming the 
King's reluctance to provide an establishment 
for his illegitimate son. " Ces enfants," he had 
remarked, "ne sont pas pour faire souche," but 
Madame de Maintenon had overthrown his 
objections one by one. 

When at last the marriage of the Due du 
Maine was discussed, as a real proposition, the 
King's attention was directed towards the Conde 
princesses, the three daughters of Monsieur le 
Prince. They had been waiting for an '* establish- 
ment" rather longer than would have been admitted 
by their rank, but the smallness of their stature 
might well have caused suitors to demur. They 
were so small, so infinitesimally small, that their 



48 THE DUG AND DUCHESSE DU MAINE 

sister-in-law, the former Mademoiselle de Nantes, 
who never missed an opportunity to prick the 
Conde pride, had nicknamed them " les poupees 
du sang.'' 

Anne Louise Benedicte, on whom the King's 
choice fell at last, was thirteen years old, and 
the tallest and prettiest of the sisters ; the 
"royal command" which reached Monsieur le 
Prince on behalf of the Due du Maine would 
have seemed preposterous a few years before, but 
the way to it had been prepared in some measure 
by the marriage of Monsieur le Due de Bourbon 
with Mademoiselle de Nantes, and the Prince de 
Conde acceded to the King's wishes, won over 
by the consideration of Monsieur du Maine's 
very marked favour at Court, and of the enormous 
riches which he had inherited from the g?'ande 
Mademoiselle. 

Had the consent of Anne Benedicte been 
asked, she would have given it most unreservedly ; 
but the natural omission of this formality did 
not trouble her. She wasted not one thought 
on the unprepossessing appearance of the man 
whom fate had selected for her husband, but 
determined without further ado to use his credit 
with the King for the purpose of scaling those 
giddy heights to which her ambition secretly 
aspired. Even without ambition, she would have 
greeted with delight this open door into the 



OPINION OF DE MAINTENON 49 

freedom of married life, this way of escape from 
the restraint of Chantilly, and from the out- 
bursts of rage of Monsieur le Prince, who " beat 
his wife and his children most brutally," as Saint- 
Simon assures us. The little Princesse de Conde 
was passionately fond of pleasure, and her child- 
hood had been utterly devoid of it. Power and 
pleasure were the two rare gifts which she 
expected from her new position, and from the day 
of her marriage she set to work to pursue her 
end with the most admirable single-mindedness. 

Madame de Maintenon also had founded great 
hopes on the Due du Maine's marriage, but her 
hopes were to be utterly frustrated. Her letters 
about the young bride, written in the first glow 
of her delight, are full of the tenderest solicitude. 

"God grant," she writes in 1692, to Madame 
de Brion, a religieuse at the convent of Mont- 
buisson, "that they (the King and Monsieur du 
Maine) may be as satisfied with this marriage 
as I am at present. I am told that she (Madame 
du Maine) is to spend the holy week at Mont- 
buisson. Make her rest well ; she is being worn 
out here by the constraint and the fatigues of 
the Court ; she is weighed down with gold and 
precious stones, and her head-dress is heavier 
than the whole of her person. It will prevent 
her from growing and from keeping in good 
health, and she is even prettier without her head- 
dress than with all her adornments ; she hardly 



50 THE DUG AND DUCHESSE DU MAINE 

eats, she does not get enough sleep, and I am 
very much afraid that they may have married her 
too young. I should like to keep her at Saint-Cyr, 
dressed like one of my veriest and running about 
the gardens as light-heartedly as they." 

A later letter, addressed to the same friend, 
sounds a slight note of misgiving. Madame de 
Maintenon's confidence in her power to influence 
the small Duchesse is slightly shaken. 

" I should not like her to be a devote de pro- 
fession,'' she writes, " but I must confess to you 
that 1 should have liked to see her more regular 
in her religious duties, and leading a life which 
would be pleasing in the eyes of God, of the 
King, and of Monsieur le Due du Maine, who 
has enough wisdom to wish his wife to be ' steadier ' 
than some others. Apart from that, she is, as you 
described her, pretty, amiable, gay, witty, and, 
above ail, she loves her husband, who, on his 
side, loves her passionately, and will spoil her 
rather than give her any pain. If she evades me, 
I shall give up my efforts, convinced that it is 
not possible for the King to find in his family a 
woman who can be influenced for good." 

The last sentence is most significant. Madame 
de Maintenon had counted on finding in the 
little princess a malleable nature, ready to be 
used for any purpose, an invaluable link with 
the great Conde family, and a child who might 

^ Some of the youngest pupils at Saint-Cyr. 



A RIVAL COURT 51 

by cajoleries and caresses win from the King 
such favours as it would be inconvenient to 
formulate in the lucid, well-reasoned speech for 
which La Marquise de Maintenon was famous. 

The Duchesse du Maine came to Versailles, 
was present at the levers and the couchers, the 
grands converts and the petits converts, walked 
back and forth with a crowd of Tartuffe courtiers 
to numberless masses at the Chapel Royal, 
followed the royal hunt to Marly in the King's 
own carriage, with all the windows down 
(according to Louis XIV.'s "odious" habit), her 
powder and her rouge at the mercy of wind 
and dust and sun. She went through the whole 
gamut of Court pleasures, decided that Versailles 
was the very temple of ennui, and determined 
without hesitation to shun it forthwith. Her 
passion for pleasure should have its dues and 
her ambition should find its satisfaction at the 
same time ; the Duchesse du Maine would have 
her own court, a rival of Versailles, and perhaps 
in time a favoured and triumphant rival. A 
great dream for a small Duchesse, but she made 
it come true, and though her triumph was short- 
lived, its taste was none the less exhilarating. 
She did not ask her husband's opinion as to her 
plans, for his opinion in all things was from 
the first, and remained to the last, a matter of 
perfect indifference to her. 



52 THE DUG AND DUCHESSE DU MAINE 

After two or three unsuccessful attempts at 
finding the ideal spot for her "Parnassus," 
Madame du Maine persuaded the Due, at 
Colbert's death, to acquire Sceaux, the vast 
domain on which the famous controleur general 
had erected a sumptuous palace. Very little 
remains of it now, and though it is constantly 
mentioned in the writings of the period, it would 
be hard to trace its real outlines, through the 
haze of allegorical effusions lavished upon it, 
and the processions of gods and goddesses, cupids 
and sylphs which are for ever winding in and 
out of its sylvan glades. Its more prosaic 
admirers, however, give us some facts : the stately 
gardens had been designed by Lenotre, of 
Versailles fame, and the famous Puget had 
adorned them with gleaming marble statues ; 
beyond the park stretched the softly undulating 
valley of the Bievre in all its simple charm and 
discreet serenity, full of mobile lights and 
shadows, and of the sound of bubbling water. 
The hills which surrounded this Arcadia, and 
the river winding round its confines, made it a 
little world in itself. Madame du Maine declared 
it enchanting. 



CHAPTER V 

THE COURT OF SCEAUX 

The little court of Sceaux had reached the 
twelfth year of its power, and its "sovereign" 
was commonly alluded to as the " Divinity of 
Sceaux," when on one (for her) memorable day 
of the year 1710, Mademoiselle Delaunay was 
introduced to it by her indefatigable cicerone, 
the Duchesse de la Ferte. Though something 
of its fame was known to her, she was not pre- 
pared for the orgy of entertainments — theatrical, 
intellectual, operatic, gastronomic — which filled the 
days she spent there. " This way of living," she 
exclaims with curt disparagement, " seemed 
unbearable to me." 

And indeed the slavery of Court life at 
Versailles, from which Madame du Maine had fled 
with such determination, was as supreme liberty 
compared with the exactions of the Court of 
Sceaux. To live there was to attempt to move 
through the glorious inconsequence of a fairy tale, 

in defiance of all the natural frailties inherent to 

53 D 2 



54 THE COURT OF SCEAUX 

the human body. Shame upon him who enter- 
tained any idea of sleep at night, or of rest at 
any time of the day ! Let him rank with the 
unthinking brutes, who could eat of a dish lacking 
the condiments of anagrams and epigrams, or don 
his doublet and hose without being reminded of 
Achilles or Hercules, and straightway informing 
of this, in gallant verses, Madame la Marquise or 
Madame la Comtesse next door, who in their 
turn must needs find inspiration for a worthy 
retort. 

Madame du Maine had decreed that "gaiety 
should ever be coupled with wit," and not one of 
the irrevocable laws of the Medes and Persians 
could ever have called for more herculean efforts 
than this. Music, dancing, acting, were but the 
commonplace foundations upon which the fancy of 
her courtiers must weave ever new and original 
designs. The Duchesse had excellent professional 
performers to execute the mechanical part of her 
entertainments ; but the ideas came from her 
and her satellites. The best dancers from the 
*' Academic de Danse " in Paris were often called 
to Sceaux, and must often have been dismayed at 
the extravagances presented to them. One can 
imagine their amazement at the following fancy, 
for instance, which sprang from the brain of 
Malezieu, chief wit of intellectual Sceaux, and 
occurs in a divertissement in which he appears 



THE ELIXIR OF TERPSICHORE 55 

himself as half-magician, half-quack. Producing a 
little flask labelled " Esprit de contredanses," he 
harangues his audience in the following startling 
fashion. " The liquid which you see here has virtues 
which could not be enumerated in a century. 
Let some one show me the most delicate lady in 
the world, the least flighty, the most sedentary, — 
if she allows but one drop of this elixir to fall upon 
her in the region of the hips, you will see her 
instantly more agile than a spirit of the air, now 
clear a haystack at one bound, now soar like a 
baUoon and dance the 'Fontaine,' the *Pistolet,' 
the * Derviche,' the ' Sissone,' the * Fricolets,' 
and 'Madame la Mare.'" 

If adaptability were required of the dancers, 
great modesty was necessary in the actors. When 
they left the stage of the Comedie Fran9aise in 
Paris, to answer some bidding from Sceaux, they 
had to forswear ambition also, for it was Madame 
du Maine's habit to claim all the most important 
parts for herself—comedy or tragedy, a farce or 
an allegory, she undertook all with equal confidence, 
and was always ready to spend interminable hours 
in learning her parts. 

" I cannot understand," said the Due du Maine, 
in whom the histrionic faculty was lacking, " why 
the Duchesse should take so much trouble in order 
to appear on the planches in public, like a mere 
professional mummer ! " 



56 THE COURT OF SCEAUX 

In this case, as in most others, she could dis- 
pense with her husband's approval, for she was 
strongly supported, and by her own set ; the 
Due de Nevers, the Comte d'Harcourt, the Due 
de Coislin, the Marquis de Sassay, the Duchesse 
d'Enghien, the Duchess of Albemarle, the Comtesse 
d'Artagnan, the Duchesse de Choiseul figured 
among the many who formed an assiduous and 
enthusiastic audience. Even Madame la Princesse 
came and looked on, wondering each time afresh 
at the unaccountable tastes of her puzzling daughter; 
and Monsieur le Prince came too, with a mis- 
chievous light in his strange burning eyes which 
set his whole face aglow. He looked on, and 
remembering the delight he had taken in donning 
all manner of disguises to add spice to his entre- 
prises d'amour, he found it easier no doubt than 
his unimaginative wife to account for what 
he saw. 

It was, of course, chiefly to the "intellectual 
bureau " of the court that Mademoiselle Delaunay 
was to be exhibited. Where the demand for 
intellect was so great, a well-organised supply 
was indispensable, and Madame du Maine had a 
small corps of familiers, whose task and profession 
it was to be witty, philosophical, ingenuous, or 
profound, according to the needs of the moment. 
First and foremost among these was Malezieu, 
the former tutor of the Due du Maine ; a brilliant 



THE ABBE GENEST 57 

mathematician, an able writer and fertile rhymester, 
he was the oracle of Sceaux. " His decisions," says 
Mademoiselle Delaunay, " were as infallible as the 
conclusions of Pythagoras, and the most heated 
disputes ceased as soon as some one declared : he 
has said so." 

Among the lesser lights shone I'Abbe Genest, 
a worthy rival of Moliere's Mascarilk, who had 
put into verse the whole of Descartes's Treatise on 
Physics; his other claims to intellectual apprecia- 
tion are unknown, and his former career is hardly 
enlightening in this matter. After being an ox- 
driver, he had become an abbe and, as such, had 
been engaged as overseer of the Due de Nevers's 
stables ; those who now enjoyed his society at 
Sceaux might often have seen him there discharg- 
ing his congenial duties among horses and stable- 
boys, striding along in his cassock, and using with 
great point and fluency the vocabulary he had 
acquired in his oxen-driving days ! 

Others were there who were more obviously 
fitted to their sphere: the President Renault, 
whose wit is sufficiently guaranteed by the life- 
long admiration of Madame du DefFand, quickest 
of all quick wits, sharpest of all sharp tongues ; 
Fontenelle, the pearl of philosophers and scientists, 
for drawing-room use ; and later on Voltaire, in 
all the verve of unbridled youth. 

Madame du Maine took but little heed of 



58 THE COURT OF SCEAUX 

Madame de la Ferte, when the latter, just as full 
of her discovery as if Versailles had not scorned 
it, insisted on vaunting her protegees talents. It 
was not the custom of the divinity of Sceaux to 
waste her time on other people's interests ; she 
hardly looked at Mademoiselle Delaunay, and 
nothing remained to Madame de la Ferte but to 
turn to Monsieur de Malezieu, and beg the 
"oracle" to pronounce himself on the value of 
her treasure. He did so, as we learn from the 
Memoirs, after spending a considerable time in 
conversation with Mademoiselle Delaunay, and 
discussing with her several matters in which he 
found her tolerably well informed. 

" His wish to oblige Madame de la Ferte," 
says the judicious object of this cross examination, 
" a natural inclination to exaggeration and perhaps 
also a certain desire to help me, made him confirm 
all the marvels which had been proclaimed about 
me. He declared that I was an exceptional person, 
and people believed it ; they never tired of admiring 
me. Baron, the famous comedian who had left the 
Paris stage thirty years before, was just then acting 
at Sceaux. He prided himself upon his wit, and 
came, like the others, to examine mine. During 
one of his visits he said to me ironically that 
Les Femmes Savantes would be acted the next day, 
and that, without doubt, he would see me there. 
I made him understand," continues his worthy 
opponent in this fencing with words, " that ' quand 



BACK IN THE CONVENT 59 

bien m^me on jouerait les femmes Savantes, il ne 
me jouerait pas ! ' " 

Thus we learn that flattery had its sting at 
Sceaux, as it has in less Olympian circles. 

Mademoiselle Delaunay was much relieved, 
when at last she was allowed to return to more 
commonplace haunts. She took leave of Madame 
de la Ferte, who deposited her at the gates of the 
convent with " a thousand caresses^," and as many 
assurances that she would see her again before 
long. " If the affair at Sceaux is not concluded 
speedily," she added, with her customary optimism, 
" I shall take other measures." 

In truth there were soon palpable proofs that 
the Duchesse's energies had not abated. A few 
chansons composed by Monsieur de Malezieu 
were sent to Mademoiselle Delaunay, with a 
request that she should write an appreciation of 
them, which Madame de la Ferte would under- 
take to remit into the author's hands. " I do 
not remember what I wrote," says the improvised 
critic, " many praises apparently, for they brought 
me a magnificent answer." It is quite evident 
that this timely praise did more to convince 
Malezieu of the writer's wisdom than the most 
oracular speeches which could have dropped from 
her lips during their past conversations. His 
answer, as a pretty example of the lavishness 



60 THE COURT OF SCEAUX 

with which at that time people meted out praise 
to themselves and to their neighbours, deserves 
to be read, at least in part. 

" You have persuaded me so entirely of the pre- 
cision and the infallibility of your judgment that 
it is not possible for me to differ from you. And 
now, Mademoiselle, by the knowledge which you 
must have of your own self, I beg you to tell 
me what I must think of your merit. Great 
geniuses like you cannot under-rate themselves. 
They render to themselves the justice which they 
extend to others, nothing is more inherent to 
them than their power of discernment, and even 
the greatest effort of their modesty can but tend 
towards gratitude to the first origin, to the 
Eternal author of their talents. You owe Him, 
Mademoiselle, more gratitude than any one else, 
and I, on my side, owe infinite thanks to Madame 
la Duchesse de la Ferte, for having graciously 
consented to unfold to me so rare a treasure. I 
should esteem myself happy, if it were permitted 
to me, to approach it sometimes, and if I might, 
were it but once in my life, testify by my services 
to the esteem and the sincere respect with which 
I am, Mademoiselle, yours, etc. etc. Malezieu. 
''At ScEAUX, on the SOth of May 1710." 

This epistle, with its rhetorical peroration, 
much encouraged Madame de la Ferte, and she 
was of the opinion that it should be taken 
seriously. There were renewed visits to Sceaux 



CARDINAL DE ROHAN 61 

in consequence, days full of fetes and of the 
assurances of Monsieur de Malezieu's " increasing 
esteem " but with no substantial results. Madame 
du Maine made no sign of wishing to add to her 
intellectual collection, and Madame de la Ferte still 
oscillated between her wish to secure her discovery 
for herself and her fear of offending Louison, 
Sylvine, and other domestic nymphs and tyrants. 
A satisfactory solution seemed as far as ever, 
when at last Madame de Ventadour intervened. 
She was a well poised, judicious woman, and 
sincerely desirous of furthering the interests of a 
talented young girl whose mother had once belonged 
to her household. She reminded the Cardinal de 
Rohan of his alluring suggestions, but the Cardinal 
eluded all responsibility. He did it gracefully 
and tactfully, as was his custom, but none the 
less decidedly. In truth little sympathy could 
be expected from the Cardinal, and this was only 
one of the many instances which might serve to 
illustrate his character, as drawn later on by the 
shrewd and keen-sighted Marquis d'Argenson. 

" His politeness," he says of De Rohan, " knows 
so well how to wear the mask of friendship or 
of interest that even while one realises that it is 
not sincere, one is fascinated by it. Whenever 
you meet him, he seems to have a thousand 
confidences to make to you, but he soon leaves 
you to run on to another." 



62 THE COURT OF SCEAUX 

This time the Cardinal masked his indifference 
behind very befitting scruples ; before anything 
could be done, Mademoiselle Delaunay's religious 
soundness must be tested, and the exact shade 
of her convictions ascertained — a very plausible 
plea from a zealous defender of the true doctrine, 
at a time when Jesuits, Jansenists, and Quietists 
made the echoes of France ring with their dis- 
sensions, but it ill-befitted the man in praise of 
whose religion all d'Argenson finds to say is that 

" he discharged his religious duties without betray- 
ing either too much boredom or too much devotion, 
and that he was careful not to debase the Church 
in his person by satisfying his taste for gallantry 
only with great princesses and high born 
cha7ioinesses." 

As may easily be inferred, the Cardinal did not 
propose to burden himself with the examination 
of Mademoiselle Delaunay's religious views — let 
those decide, he urged judiciously, who knew her 
in her early years. Monsieur de Fontenelle was 
accordingly consulted on the subject ; but here 
again indifference threatened to check advance. 
The philosopher's chief object in life v/as to keep 
himself immune from the wear and tear of human 
responsibilities ; he could not allow altruistic 
efforts to mar the perfection of a constitution 
which was to carry him serene and safe into his 
hundredth year ; and so, dismissing the subject in 



A SPIRITUAL EXAMINATION 63 

as few words as possible, Monsieur de Fontenelle 
declared that all he knew about this was that 
Mademoiselle Delaunay had been brought up in 
a convent under the Jesuits. Reassuring as this 
sounded to devotees of religious court etiquette, 
it was hardly exhaustive, and the Abbe de Fressan, 
future Archbishop of Rouen, was called in by 
Madame de la Ferte to conduct the examination 
on more business-like principles. He arrived, and, 
according to Mademoiselle Delaunay, his orthodox 
method in doctrinal examination consisted in an 
interchange of pleasantries, to which the young 
postulant's contributions were so apt that they 
won her the most favourable testimonials ! 

Her newly - acquired certificates of religious 
soundness did not lead directly to anything, but 
why give up hope ? There was certainly, as Madame 
de la Ferte truthfully remarked, " no scarcity of 
young girls, daughters of great houses, who were 
in need of a good education, and in still greater 
need of good principles." 

The Duchesse was discussing this question one 
day with one of those abbes, whose little black 
collets were constantly flitting in and out of 
salons and boudoirs, and he bethought himself 
that Madame la Princesse might be glad to avail 
herself of such superior talents for the education of 
her niece, Mademoiselle de Clermont. Monsieur 
de Malezieu, hearing of this suggestion, thought, 



64 THE COURT OF SCEAUX 

with masculine simplicity, that he could hasten 
matters by getting Madame du Maine's recom- 
mendation, but he only delayed everything by 
rousing in his patroness the truly feminine dis- 
position to discover a sudden fascination in any- 
thing offered to another woman. '* If this girl 
has so much merit," exclaimed the Duchesse with 
irrefutable candour, " why give her to my niece ? 
Would it not be better to engage her for myself ? " 

Monsieur de Malezieu agreed most heartily, 
and the affair might have been considered as 
settled, had its conclusion depended on more stable 
factors than Madame du Maine and Madame de la 
Fert^. A sudden jealousy leaped up between 
them, a duel of outraged feeling ensued, and 
grieved astonishment, indignant surprise, haughty 
aloofness, accusations of double-dealing, afforded 
fine weapons for either opponent, and were wielded 
indiscriminately by both. 

Meanwhile Mademoiselle Delaunay was still 
at the convent, still without anything to do, but 
to bear from time to time with the Duchesse de 
la Ferte's stormy scenes, to read her volcanic 
letters, and to steer as best she could between her 
anger and her infatuation. In this manner months 
went by, and the young girl's natural diplomacy 
seems to have forsaken her during that unhappy 
time ; she deplores it herself in her Memoirs, and 
holds herself responsible to a great extent for the 





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MADEMOISELLE D'ORLEANS, 
Daughter of the Regent Philippe d'Orleans. 



To face p. 64. 



AN OPENING AT COURT 65 

fatal consequences. One or two unwise letters 
in which she described her position to Monsieur 
de Malezieu fell into Madame de la Ferte's hands, 
and brought about a denouement which proved 
to be a vengeance, planned and carried out in one 
of the Duchesse's impulsive moods. 

A very non - committal letter was the first 
herald of the catastrophe. It was addressed to 
Mademoiselle Delaunay by Monsieur de Malezieu 
and ran thus: — 

" At last, Mademoiselle, the time has come. 
I am bidden by Madame la Duchesse du Maine 
to inform you that she has determined not to 
demur any longer. It will be a great pleasure 
to me. Mademoiselle, soon to be in a position to 
render you some slight services, and to prove 
to you in deed that I am, beyond all expression, 
your very humble, etc., etc. 

''At ScEAUX, on the Uth Sept 1711." 

A fulminating epistle from Madame de la Ferte 
accompanied this, at the end of which she ordered 
Mademoiselle Delaunay to come to Sceaux the 
next day, where she would herself present her 
to Their Serene Highnesses, the Due and the 
Duchesse du Maine. 

Henriette Delaunay, who had brought the two 
letters, completed her mission by enlightening her 
sister as to their true significance. It seems that 
one of Madame du Maine's waiting- women having 



66 THE COURT OF SCEAUX 

been dismissed, her place had been judged good 
enough for Mademoiselle Delaunay, whose reputa- 
tion was very much on the wane. Madame de la 
Ferte had strongly advocated this as a means of 
revenge ; and she promised herself much pleasure 
from the spectacle of her former protegee's humilia- 
tion. " I foresaw my ruin in this event," says the 
victim of these circumstances, " and I felt that the 
indelible mark of servitude upon me would always 
prevent any favourable turn of my fortune. It 
was, however, impossible to draw back. I could 
not disown all the steps I had taken to belong to 
Madame du Maine's household, and I could not 
insist on any conditions as to my position. I had 
to bend my neck under the yoke. I arrived at 
Sceaux in obedience to Madame de la Ferte's 
orders ; she led me in triumph to the Duchesse, 
who hardly deigned to throw a glance at me, and 
then she continued to drag me round, chained to 
her chariot, to all the people to whom I was to be 
presented ; I followed her with the countenance of 
a vanquished captive. When this ceremonial had 
at last come to an end, she told me that now I 
had no more need of her, and that henceforth she 
would have nothing more to do with me." 



CHAPTER VI 

GREAT TRIALS AND SMALL TRIUMPHS 

Even in the half-dazed state in which Madame 
de la Ferte's departure left her, Mademoiselle 
Delaunay's heart must have sunk within her when 
she saw the wretched quarters allotted to her. In 
her most pessimistic moods she could never have 
imagined herself in such a hovel. It was so low 
that one had to bend one's neck in order to save 
one's head, and its darkness would have satisfied 
the darkest conspirators. The outer air hardly 
penetrated into it, and there were no means of 
heating it in cold weather. Moreover, this com- 
modious residence was to be at her exclusive 
disposal for the night only, the rest of the time 
she shared it with one of Madame du Maine's 
women who did night duty, and who resorted to 
the entresol in the day time, either to sleep or 
to play cards and quarrel noisily with her husband. 
No other refuge remained then to the unwilling 
witness of these scenes except the distant alleys 
of the park, and when the rain or the cold drove 
her indoors she tried to get a little warmth by 

67 



68 GREAT TRIALS AND SMALL TRIUMPHS 
walking up and down the half open galleries which 
ran round the castle. 

In the first days of her "servitude" she had 
hazarded some objections to Monsieur de Malezieu, 
but " her very humble servant " had forgotten all 
his former protestations of devotion; he hardly 
listened to her, and she did not expose herself 
a second time to his disdain, nor to that of so 
many others who possessed in an equal degree 
the convenient talent of opportune forgetfulness. 

She schooled herself to indifference, or at 
least to a semblance of it, and as an aspirant to 
stoicism, she certainly had excellent opportunities 
for a thorough apprenticeship. She soon dis- 
covered that an absence of fireplaces and the 
presence of one woman to share an apartment 
might be indescribable boons ; for at the abode 
of the Duchesse du Maine in Versailles her rooms 
were always full of stifling smoke, and she had 
two colleagues to share them night and day. 
" Never had the smallest ray of light penetrated 
into them," she moans ; " besides, the want of 
space made it necessary to quarrel incessantly in 
order to hold your ground, whilst the smoke 
made you abandon it the moment after. My 
two room mates were on bad terms with each 
other, and it was impossible to conciliate one, 
without alienating the other." 

The unfortunate girl, accustomed to the 



FRICTION 69 

niceties of speech and mind of cultivated people, 
felt that there could exist no system by which 
one might gauge the inscrutable workings of 
a servant's mind. " I should have liked to con- 
ciliate all, but even the cleverest politician would 
have failed," she exclaims in her despair. " One 
might gain some influence over people with sane 
views, familiar interests, ordinary passions, but not 
over those creatures whose ideas are topsy-turvy, 
whose reasonings defy reason and whose interests 
grovel in the dust." 

She offended mortally the susceptibilities of 
the high and mighty corps of the waiting- women ; 
it was inevitable, but none the less dangerous, 
for the stability of her position. Her sister, 
having heard of the difficulties, implored her to 
mend matters. " What am I to do ? " enquired 
the culprit, with the docility born of utter dis- 
couragement. The remedy suggested seemed 
simple enough — pay a few calls on the divers 
waiting-women belonging to the house guests, 
and soothe their ruffled feelings with compliments 
and advances. Circumstances happened to be 
favourable, a great number of these "ladies," 
being off* duty, were just then assembled in the 
common garde-robe, playing cards and gossiping. 

The women of the Duchesse d'Anjou were 

approached first, as the highest in the land ; 

though they were not the rose, they lived nearest 

E 2 



70 GREAT TRIALS AND SMALL TRIUMPHS 

the rose, some of its fragrance might cling to 
them and make them a connecting link between 
two hostile species. Alas for the disastrous results I 
They asked Mademoiselle Delaunay how much 
profit she derived from this, how much from that, 
and as she appeared totally ignorant on these 
important points, they turned their backs with 
contempt upon a person so evidently weak- 
minded and resourceless. The next move was 
not much happier ; the determined peace-maker 
seized upon the first individual who hove in 
sight, and poured upon her all the praise with 
which she had formerly intended to win the 
whole corps ; her shortsightedness had played 
her a trick, she had hit upon the last person to 
deserve her laudations, and it was so generally 
evident that a loud burst of laughter greeted 
her unlucky efforts ! 

Incongruously enough she seemed doomed 
to appear stupid in a position which was in 
reality much below her mental capacities. Partly 
from timidity and inexperience, partly owing to 
her bad sight, she committed incredible blunders, 
some of which she describes in her Memoirs, 
when she dwells on past miseries. 

" When I entered upon the duties of my office," 
she relates, " I was given as my first task some 
chemises to cut out. I felt greatly puzzled, for 
I had never done any needlework, except the 



' DRESSING-ROOM TROUBLES 71 

useless fancy work with which one whiles away 
one's time in convents. I spent a whole day in 
taking measurements and in trying to carry 
out this great enterprise ; . . . but, when Madame 
du Maine put on her chemise she found at the 
wrist the part which ought to have been at the 
elbow ! " 

Luckily for her inexperienced waiting-woman 
Madame du Maine's petulance was not wasted 
on the fit of her chemises. 

" She asked who had performed this beautiful 
feat, and on being informed of it she said quite 
undisturbed that I evidently did not know how 
to sew, and that henceforth this work would have 
to be allotted to some one else." 

The Duchesse had need of an unruffled dis- 
position, in order to put up with Mademoiselle 
Delaunay's gaucheries. The first time she asked 
for some water, her new waiting-woman poured 
it over one of her most delicate court dresses, 
and the unlucky girl could never find anything 
she was ordered to fetch. 

" One day," she says, "the Duchesse told me 
to bring her some rouge and a little cup of 
water from her dressing-table. I went into her 
room, where I remained bewildered, not knowing 
in which direction to turn. The Princesse de 
Guise happened to be passing through, and 
astonished to see me in this state of confusion, 



72 GREAT TRIALS AND SMALL TRIUMPHS 

* What are you doing here ? ' she asked. * Eh, 
Madame,' I replied, ' a cup, some rouge, a dressing- 
table, I can see nothing of all these.' Touched by 
my despair, she put into my hands what I would 
have looked for in vain, without her help. Another 
day, Madame la Duchesse du Maine, being at her 
dressing-table, asked me for some powder. I took 
the box by the lid ; it dropped open, as it naturally 
would, and all the powder fell on the dress of 
the Princess, who said quietly : ' When you take 
up a thing you should hold it at the bottom.' I 
remembered this lesson so well that several days 
after, when the Duchesse asked me for her purse, 
I took it up by the bottom part, and was most 
astonished to see its contents, a hundred louis or 
so, scattered on the floor." 

What we seem to be has a curious power of 
making us into what we are, or what we think 
we are for the time being, and we grope in vain 
after our personality when untoward circumstances 
have distorted it beyond the power of even our 
own recognition. For a time, at least. Mademoiselle 
Delaunay felt mentally annihilated, and if she ever 
read over again the letter which the Marquis de 
Silly had written to her when she entered Madame 
du Maine's household, some parts of it must have 
seemed to her the very bitterest irony. 

" Do not," wrote this cautious adviser, " reveal 
more of your wit than is adapted to the needs of 



THE DONKEY'S KICK 73 

those to whom you are speaking. Be satisfied 
with showing wisdom and pleasant accompHsh- 
ments. They are far more appreciated than wit ; 
which is apt to be feared." 



The recipient of this good advice had come to 
feel very safe from the complications incumbent on 
superior qualities of the mind. Had not an old 
cure strengthened her in this peculiar security by 
asking her, as she was standing sponsor to a 
child, if she would be capable of signing her 
name in the parish register ! " This was truly," 
she remarks, "the donkey's kick." 

To make matters worse, she was soon to find 
out that her position, however lowly, was not out 
of the reach of intrigues. One of Madame du 
Maine's ladies-in-waiting, whose chief occupation 
was to play the part of the classical confidente on 
the Sceaux theatre, took pity on Mademoiselle 
Delaunay's disconsolate wanderings in the park, 
and offered her the use of her rooms. At 
Versailles, shortly after, she asked her to repay 
her favours by allowing her the use of the entresol, 
if she should happen to need it. Puzzled at the 
thought that her very unenviable quarters could 
be wanted, but feeling under an obligation, she 
acceded to the request. Unluckily the lady in 
question put the said entresol to an injudicious 
use, the nature of which brought down upon her 



74 GREAT TRIALS AND SMALL TRIUMPHS 

the righteous wrath of her lord and master. A 
scandal ensued, in which Mademoiselle Delaunay's 
name was mixed up ; and this circumstance 
wounded to the quick the delicate sensibilities of 
the waiting- women's corps ! Mademoiselle Manette, 
chosen as spokeswoman, was sent to express the 
general feeling. " This adventure," she said, 
"is very unpleasant for all of us, people are 
speaking of one of Madame du Maine's women, 
and Von se voit confondue." '' Je me trouvais 
moi-memer remarks the victim, ''si confondue de 
viv7'e avec elle, que je naurais jamais pense que 
ce malheur did la regarderT 

From her utter weariness, humiliation, and 
despair. Mademoiselle Delaunay saw but one 
escape — death, and she resolved to force open 
its gates. Before she put an end to her life, 
however, she would allow her cramped soul one 
moment of blissful expansion, she would strip her 
heart naked and revel in its nakedness, she would 
write to Monsieur de Silly all that she had never 
dared to say to him. The letter was written, but 
was never sent. " Having yielded so far to my 
madness," says its writer, " I felt my reason return 
to me and resolved to live." She kept the letter 
" as a warning " against herself, and as a proof of 
" the excesses into which one falls when one gives 
way to one's passions." A letter dictated by 
passion and confiscated by reason has seldom 



A MOVING LETTER 75 

escaped the flames — the exceptional fate of this 
one makes it worthy of being quoted : 

" Five years ago I saw you for the first time. 
You treated me with an indifference which seemed 
to border on contempt. Irritated against you, 
I sought to discover faults in you, and only 
discovered charms and virtues. I wished to hate 
you, and I loved you ; then my sole endeavour 
was to hide from you feelings which I well believed 
could not be reciprocated. And yet I could not 
bear that your insensibility should keep you 
ignorant of them. The slightest attentions from 
you touched me very deeply, and so ardently 
did I wish to be indebted to you that I found 
reasons for my gratitude even in your coldness. 
I looked upon it as a laudable effort to tear out 
of my heart hopes which would prove vain and 
dangerous. You might even have treated me 
with harshness, without any other consequence 
than the increase of the esteem in which I held 
you, an esteem so perfect and so respectful that 
it even made me condemn to myself the desire 
to please you without, however, robbing me of 
it. Neither a long absence, nor the changes in 
my fortune, nor the efforts of experienced reason- 
ing have prevailed upon me to make me forget. 
I went further in my endeavours, I wished to 
see, and I saw those who were reputed most 
worthy of being loved. How different from you 
they seemed to me ! No one resembles you and 
nothing resembles the feeling which I have for 
you. I cannot accustom myself to seeing people 



76 GREAT TRIALS AND SMALL TRIUMPHS 

in love with each other, and I do not understand 
that one could love any one but you. What are 
you thinking at the present moment of the con- 
fession which I am making to you ? As to me, 
I feel no shame for it, and a feeling such as 
mine commands respect. I am not endeavouring 
to touch you. I only wanted to make known to 
you what I feel, and my resolution to put an 
end to my unhappiness. I feel too deeply that 
I belong to you, to think of disposing of myself 
without giving you an account of my decision. 
I await one word from you, and it is the only 
thing I shall await before bidding you adieu for 
ever." 

Just about that time one of those "civic" 
agitations which sometimes convulsed the little 
court of Sceaux, occurred very opportunely to 
rescue Mademoiselle Delaunay from her state of 
despondency. From the secluded vantage ground 
of her entresol, unsuspected by any one, she took 
her humorous share in the agitation. It was due 
this time to one of the Duchesse du Maine's 
ingenious institutions for the pursuit of intellectual 
pleasure. On one of her most creative days she 
had founded the Order of the " Mouche-a-miel," 
or " Order of the Bee," of which she was naturally 
the grande-maitresse. Its motto, " Piccola si, ma 
fa pur gravi le ferite," was an allusion to her 
stature and a retort to the taunts of her dis- 
agreeable sister-in-lawj the former Mademoiselle 



ORDER OF THE BEE 77 

de Nantes. The order had its own statutes ; and 
its limited number of members could be elected 
from either sex. Its ceremonies were conducted 
with the utmost gravity, and no Chevalier du 
Saint Esprit could have received his grand cordon 
from the hands of the king with greater awe 
than did the chevaliers and the chevalieres de la 
Mouche-a-miel fasten on their shoulder the little 
golden bee, which was the emblem of their dignity. 
On bended knee they took the oath which savoured 
strongly of Malezieu's pomposity, and in which 
they swore " by all the bees of Mount Hymettus " 
to be loyal to their queen, and asked that in case 
of defection their miel might be turned into Jiel, 
and that other laboriously thought out jeux de 
mots might be turned into serious realities, 
expressly for their chastisement. 

The election of a new member was to take 
place a few months after Mademoiselle Delaunay's 
arrival, and the whole court was in a flutter of 
excitement. Among a great number of candi- 
dates, the most eligible, it seems, were the 
Comtesse de Brassac, the Comtesse d'Uzes, and the 
President de Romanet. Whether the grande- 
maitresse was influenced by the latter's dignity 
or by his sex, is a debatable point ; at any rate 
he gained the victory over his two feminine 
rivals. They owed it to themselves and to their 
sex to recriminate, and the whole of Sceaux was 



78 GREAT TRIALS AND SMALL TRIUMPHS 

formed into two hostile camps bandying at each 
other accusations of unfair deahngs and illegal 
procedure. 

Mademoiselle Delaunay, in her entresol, with 
plenty of leisure for mental gymnastics, gathered 
up these complaints which were rending the very 
air, and amused herself by writing them up in 
legal style, giving free play to the tone of 
chicanery with which Madame de Grieu's legal 
difficulties had made her familiar. She even 
went so far as to send them in the form of a 
petition, and in the defendants' name, to the 
President de Romanet. This composition, small 
as may seem its chances of providing entertain- 
ment, engrossed Sceaux for the better part of 
two weeks. Monsieur de Malezieu, in his quality 
of first wit, was the first to be charged with the 
authorship ; he regretfully denied it, and the 
accusation went on from greater to lesser until 
it fell upon the most witless. " But no one," 
sighs Mademoiselle Delaunay, " ever thought of 
me as the author ! " She had to comfort herself 
with the silent enjoyment of the fruitless search, 
and by composing thereupon a few verses which 
nobody ever read, until she put them in her 
Memoirs. 

Her next interference with public affairs met 
with more success, and she owed it to the 
famous Monsieur de Fontenelle and the obscure 



A DEMI-GOD'S SUBJUGATION 79 

Mademoiselle Tetar. This damsel proclaimed 
that she had been chosen by the powers above 
as an instrument for occult demonstrations. All 
Paris went to see her, and Monsieur de Fontenelle 
went too, not from mere curiosity, like the 
common herd, but as a champion of the reliability 
of Nature's character, and in order to expose these 
alleged insults to the immutability of her laws. 
His investigations lasted longer than would have 
been deemed necessary, and were inspired, so 
it was rumoured, less by an interest in science 
than by a quite unscientific infatuation with 
Mademoiselle Tetar 's natural charms. Great was 
the merriment over the demi-god's subjugation, 
and even his Olympian calm was at length stung 
into retaliation, so numerous were the merciless 
gibes thrown at him. 

In the midst of the battle of words and jeers 
which ensued, Mademoiselle Delaunay, who was 
always staunch in her friendships, wrote to 
Monsieur de Fontenelle a letter assuring him of 
her partisanship and laughing at his detractors. 

This letter was not particularly witty, one 
would now consign it to the waste-paper basket 
without a regret, even if one were the author of 
it, but in that golden age, when intellect was at 
such a premium, it met with a wonderful fate. 
Fontenelle, being one day at the Marquis de 
Lassays, and finding himself again a butt to the 



80 GREAT TRIALS AND SMALL TRIUMPHS 

usual pleasantries, drew his letter out of his 
pocket and showed it all round, saying : " This 
contains better pleasantries." It was read by 
all who were present, it was copied and circulated 
at large. " All the Germans here," wrote Monsieur 
de Silly from Friburg later on, " wish to have a 
copy of it." 

The Duchesse du Maine was one of the last 
to ask for the wonderful letter, and discovering 
that all who were present at Sceaux had a copy 
of it in their pocket, she began to realise the 
glory emanating from her household. '* She read 
the letter," reports Mademoiselle Delaunay, 
"approved of it, and understood that she could 
derive greater profit from me than she had 
done so far. I myself began to wish, like all 
the others, to possess a copy of my letter and to 
think highly of it." 



CHAPTER VII 

SLAVES OF PLEASURE AT SCEAUX 

The T^tar episode had done a great deal towards 
Mademoiselle Delaunay's advancement. Now her 
Serene Highness did condescend sometimes to hold 
some real conversation with her, she seemed to 
appreciate her mind, and even allowed her 
occasionally to be present at the discussions of 
the wits of Sceaux. Henceforth Mademoiselle 
Delaunay was not quite a waiting-woman, but 
she was nothing else yet, and woe to her if she 
presumed to cross the boundary lines. It was 
just then that every evening in the Duchesse's 
boudoir, the Latin poem. The Anti-Lucretia, 
used to be read and discussed before a fluttering, 
chiefly feminine, audience, by its exquisite 
but rather malicious author, the Cardinal de 
Polignac. The lonely tenant of the dark entresol 
hungered for intellectual pastures, and she dared 
to beg for admittance. The very genius of pride 
and vainglory must have been at work in her 
mind, when she had thus presumed to ignore 

proper distances ; she realised it too late alas, 

81 F 



82 SLAVES OF PLEASURE AT SCEAUX 

when a crushing and peremptory refusal brought 
her to her senses! 

To balance small failures, however, there were 
small successes : the number of her friends in- 
creased steadily, and it happened more and more 
frequently that some of them found their way 
to her entresol ; " though," she said, " it was a 
difficult matter to discover me under the stairs 
where I made my residence." To her came one 
day the Abbe de Vaubrun, one of those petits 
collets permanently attached to the court of 
Sceaux. He was full of a new plan for a totally 
novel divei'tissement, very elated at his ideas too, 
and his elation was pardonable indeed, for it 
must have needed a prodigious inventiveness to 
think of something new in the face of the endless 
succession of fetes, ballets, and masquerades 
through the medium of which mythology, history, 
and allegory paid their homage to the queen of 
Sceaux. One cannot help thinking that there 
must have been an element of satiety in the fact 
that the denoument of these elaborately con- 
structed intrigues could always be apprehended 
with absolute certainty. Was it not irksome to 
the Divinity of Sceaux to know, without any 
possibility of doubt, that the treasures for which 
Merlin and a procession of lesser magicians were 
searching so diligently, would inevitably prove 
to be the treasures of her own incomparable 
mind, and that the lost girdle of Venus would 



NIGHT AND DETESTABLE SLEEP 8S 

naturally be discovered encircling her own waist. 
But no, she never wearied of these flatteries, 
was she not the Divinity of Sceaux, and do not 
the gods drink nectar for ever, with ever-smiling 
serenity ? 

The Abbe's original idea was not quite as 
original as he thought ; it needed, as usual, the 
help of allegorical figures for its interpretation ; 
but its novelty lay in the proposal to exploit the 
Duchesse's peculiar partiality for the night, as 
opposed to the day, and in the suggestion to 
make that the keynote of the whole. Night was 
looked upon with great disfavour at Sceaux, and 
sleep stood in utter disrepute. 

" Detestable sleep ! " exclaim some verses 
dedicated to the Duchesse, "leave our enchanted 
fields, and go to feed the laziness of the monks. 
Go to fatten sluggish canons, and to instil into 
their numb senses the elixir of thy poppies. 
These dullards think to lengthen their life by 
the means of sleep, but they are dead already, 
and sleep has performed upon them the offices 
of Atropos ! " 

This was very well for the Duchesse, who seems 
to have really been immune from most frailties 
of the flesh ; but the strongest courtier's instinct 
must have been needed in others, to keep up 
nodding heads, to keep clear the weary eyes 
clouding over with sleep. There is no miracle 
that is impossible, however, to the true monarchic 



g4 SLAVES OF PLEASURE AT SCEAUX 

feeling, and night after night the subjects stayed 
awake with their queen; they professed to share 
her horror for the garish light of day, and here 
was a self-sacrificing courtier actually ready with 
suggestions for further night revels ! His idea 
was to make Night appear as an allegorical figure, 
in order to thank Madame du Maine in well- 
polished verses, of course, for the preference 
accorded to her. Noblesse oblige .... there 
would henceforth be less sleep than ever ! As 
the Abbe's strong point was not the making 
of verses, he asked Mademoiselle Delaunay to 
compose the harangue of Night, adding gallantly 
that she would also be the one most capable of 
delivering it. She acceded to his request, and 
this was the beginning of the famous Grandes 
Nuits de Sceauoc — a harassing series of night- 
entertainments, applauded by many, cursed 
perhaps by not a few in the safe sanctum of 
their inner privacy. 

" The only merit of the first performance," 
says its modest author, "was its element of 
unexpectedness. I executed it very badly, for 
I was seized with terror at the idea of speaking 
in public, and remembered only very insufficiently 
what I had to say I " 

In spite of this, she was asked several times 
again to recite and even to sing, until it was 
proved that her stage fright was incurable ; then 



LITERARY LOTTERIES 85 

she was allowed to retire, and was granted as a 
compensation the dignity of an advising member 
to the committee for the planning of the Grandes 
Nuits. 

It was no doubt a great honour, and not a 
sinecure ; none knew it better than the unfortunate 
Monsieur de Malezieu, President of the Committee, 
and reponsible for all its vagaries — reponsible also, 
alas ! for any absence of novel ideas. The stress 
of circumstances made him at last turn to Fate for 
help, and he instituted the so-called, "literary 
lotteries" which must have daunted the most 
dauntless. The letters of the alphabet were put 
in a bag, into which all the members of the 
committee had to dip, and to draw out, each in 
turn, the fateful letter from which there was no 
escape. " S " stood for a sonnet — it was a favourite 
letter, and probably elusive in consequence ; " F " 
meant a fable ; " C " demanded a comedy ; alas 
for the serious- minded who drew it ! " O " was 
the most formidable. He whose unlucky hand fell 
upon " O " had to produce a whole operetta unless 
he could attune his mind to the lofty strains of an 
ode — in which case his levity was excused in favour 
of the nobler sentiment. The last of the Grandes 
Nuits was composed entirely by Mademoiselle 
Delaunay, and she was publicly proclaimed the 
author of it. It was a great success, and could 

hardly have failed to entrance the spectators, so 

f2 



86 SLAVES OF PLEASURE AT SCEAUX 

deftly had she mixed into it the ingredients which 
make that special incense which is peculiarly agree- 
able to the nostrils of gods and semi-gods. 

The main thread, connecting more or less success- 
fully the various incidents, was the idea that " good 
taste " had found a refuge in Sceaux, had selected 
it as a permanent residence, and was the presiding 
genius over all Madame du Maine's actions. The 
author's own account of her production, as it appears 
in her Memoirs, is not entrancing, and it is a relief 
to get to the end of her description: "At last 
the Genii of Laughter appear and erect a stage 
for the performance of a comedy in one act, the 
grand finale of the whole." The theme of this 
play was one of the Duchesse's latest intellectual 
passions ; the search for the " magic square," a 
pursuit which had kept Sceaux in breathless 
suspense for several weeks, and specially harassed 
poor Monsieur de Malezieu, who was occasionally 
obliged to pay dearly for his title of "Euclid of 
Sceaux." The success of the comedy, whatever 
its merits or demerits may have been, was assured 
by the fact that Madame du Maine herself was to 
act the chief part in it — a circumstance which made 
it appear perfect to all eyes, her own included. 

It was a great occasion for Mademoiselle 
Delaunay, and was marked by the bestowal upon 
her of a very special favour — a miniature portrait 
of the Duchesse represented as Hebe. As a likeness, 



A FINANCIAL CHECK 87 

it may have been indifferent, but it was received 

with transports of delights which were duly 

modelled into enthusiastic verses. The Duchesse 

answered these delirious protestations with four 

lines, which sound refreshingly simple. 

" Vous me payez avec usure, 
Launay, d'un mediocre don, 
L' original et la peinture 
Ne valent pas votre chanson." 

The enormous expenses entailed by these gorgeous 

night entertainments made it at last necessary to 

interrupt them; had it not been for this prosaic 

but merciful circumstance, the court of Sceaux 

might have perished from exhaustion, without even 

risking a stifled yawn ! But alas ! the load had 

only been shifted ; the Duchesse having retrenched, 

now went to the other extreme, henceforth only 

the pure treasures of the mind were to be expended 

on pleasure, and this called for the most strenuous 

mental efforts. One dined and supped and lived 

on " quatrains " and " sextains " anagrams, epigrams, 

and enigmas. Some happy minds would at times 

produce quite tolerably pretty lines ; Saint Aulaire, 

for instance, when he gently railed at the Duchesse 

for her excessive interest in philosophy. 

" Bergere, detachons-nous 
De Newton, de Descartes, 
Ces deux especes de fous 
N'ont jamais vu le dessous 
Des cartes," 



88 SLAVES OF PLEASURE AT SCEAUX 

Fontenelle, too, was occasionally quite felicitous. 
It was he who at one of the Sceaux suppers 
made, to a riddle proposed, the happy answer 
which has become classical : " What is," some 
one asked, " the difference between a clock and 
the mistress of the house ? " " The one records the 
hours, the other makes you forget them," 
answered quickly the gallant Fontenelle. 

On the other hand, it is hardly to be 
wondered at that sometimes the Muse refused 
to be coaxed, and that De Malezieu being one 
day called upon to "versify" could find nothing 
but these lame and pathetic three lines : 

" Lorsque Minerve nous ordonne, 
On a toujours assez d'esprit ; 
Si Ton n'en a pas, elle en donne." 

Alas ! even Minerva's wit ran short sometimes, 
as is sufficiently proved by her anagram on the 
Abbe Charles Genest, who shared with the im- 
mortal Cyrano the inconvenience of having too 
large a nose. The Duchesse was lost in deep 
thought for a while, considering with knitted 
brows the letters which made up the Abbe's 
name, then suddenly clapping her hands, she 
exclaimed triumphantly, ''Eh, cest large nezT' 

This brilliant anagram is preserved in the 
Divertissements de Sceaux with other gems of 
its kind. Even Mademoiselle Delaunay quotes 
from them with complacency sayings which 



A RELEGATED DUKE 89 

would have made her yawn in any other 
atmosphere ; but subhmity is a powerful narcotic 
to common-sense. The Due du Maine was 
the only one at Sceaux who was excluded 
from intellectual divertissements. The Duchesse 
had recognised from the first her husband's 
peculiar talents, and had allotted him his part 
accordingly. For him the patient toil, the 
cunning machinations, the persevering cringing 
by which credit and influence are won at Court, 
for her the benefits attained. He was continually 
at Versailles, or in the vicinity of the King, 
where the true courtier must ever be seen, 
and if by chance he was at Sceaux, he was under 
strict orders for the use of his time. While his 
guests were discussing the Pluralities of the 
Worlds he was relegated to one of the pavilions 
at the far end of the park, and advised to 
cultivate his talent for figures, or as a relaxation 
was sometimes allowed to draw designs for 
flower-beds or new avenues in the park of 
Sceaux. He submitted readily enough, as a 
rule, rebelling only in a few cases, when pro- 
vocation proved too great. It had happened, 
for instance, in connection with the Anti-Lucrece. 
In spite of a literary reputation achieved at the 
early age of seven, the Due had been excluded 
from the readings, and his sense of justice was 
sore within him. At the far end of the park of 



90 SLAVES OF PLEASURE AT SCEAUX 

Sceaux, in his secluded tower, he meditated upon 
means of retaliation, and one day, tremulously, 
for he understood his position, yet with a 
pathetic eagerness for praise, he brought his 
wife a French version of the Anti-Lucrece, the 
first part of which he had just completed. Great 
was the Duchesse's indignation. " Yes," she said 
to him with fine scorn, "you will wake up one 
day to find yourself a member of the Academy ; 
but the Due d'Orleans will have been appointed 
Regent of France ! " 



CHAPTER VIII 

THE TRAGIC END OF A LONG REIGN 

Meanwhile history was shaping itself, and 
Mademoiselle Delaunay was not to be con- 
demned altogether to the lonely exclusiveness 
of Sceaux. Versailles, which once had been the 
object of the Duchesse du Maine's contempt and 
aversion, was rapidly becoming a strong magnet 
for her ambition. From the powerful though 
still hidden drama, which centred round the 
King's residence, emanated an atmosphere which 
drew her irresistibly to watch for coming events. 
A catastrophe was impending, inevitable — the 
disintegration of the country, the falling of the 
old regime ? Who knew ! and who knew how 
the spoils would be divided ! 

France, struggling in the throes of an end- 
less fight, the war of the Spanish succession, was 
vainly trying to solve an insoluble problem — 
how to raise funds from exhausted sources. For 
the first time the King had been known to throw 

up his hands publicly, to break down in the very 

91 



92 THE TRAGIC END 

presence of his council, and to declare that the 
situation was hopeless. Le " Roi Soleil," who had 
run his course with such splendid ruthlessness, 
was becoming human at last ; and there was 
something demoralising in that spectacle. Once 
already, on addressing his Breton States on the 
subject of a new tax voted unanimously by 
them, he had surprised his audience by using 
the word "gratitude" towards them, and he 
himself had started visibly as this unaccustomed 
word had fallen from his lips. Private financiers, 
gens de peu, as the haughty Saint-Simon described 
them, were admitted into the inner presence to 
discuss with the King himself, as man to man, the 
matter of loans and the raising of funds. Times 
were changed indeed ! 

The country had hardly recovered from the 
terrible famine which had followed upon the hard 
winter of 1709. It had been the haunting horror 
of the Dauphin's last months, and he had not dared 
to show his face in the streets of Paris, where 
clamours for bread and entreaties surged round 
him like the waves of an angry sea. He was dead 
now — his unheroic soul had escaped from 
threatening responsibilities, and the King, an 
enfeebled old man, was wearily continuing the 
struggle. 

In 1710, just before the death of the Emperor 
of Austria had turned the course of events by 
directing English apprehensions towards Austria's 




PERE LE TELLIER. 



To face p. 92. 



A ROYAL REIGN OF TERROR 93 

pretensions, Louis XIV., to provide for the 
gigantic expenses of the war, had declared a tax 
of one-tenth on all income. This new burden had 
raised a storm of rebellion, and while the country- 
was groaning under ever-renewed impositions, 
a kind of reign of terror had been inaugurated in 
the Church by the coming into power of Father 
Le Tellier, confessor to the King. He had 
succeeded Pere La Chaise in 1710, and the hold 
which he had immediately obtained over the 
King's mind had an element of the sinister in 
it. Totally devoid of conscience, devoured by 
ambition, and shrinking from no crime, he had 
deliberately set to work to exile from the Court, 
and to oust from positions of importance all those 
who were not ready to be his willing tools. 
By his system of intimidation and delation he 
brought about the downfall of much that was still 
honourable in the Church, and there were priests, 
bishops, and even cardinals, who lived in daily fear 
of the lettre de cachet which would send them to 
the Bastille. 

Madame de Maintenon disapproved, but re- 
mained silent ; the burden of her life at Court was 
becoming intolerable to her — her private letters at 
that time bear ample testimony to this. As to the 
King, he was entirely subjugated. Le Tellier was 
his conscience ; he was the arbiter and the fate of 
France. There had been a startling proof of that 
in the case of the recently proposed income tax. 



94 THE TRAGIC END 

While this measure was under discussion the 
King had seemed harassed and preoccupied, and 
his confessor had asked the reason of this. Louis 
had expressed his many scruples. " Oh ! " Le Tellier 
had replied, " these hesitations are a proof of too 
delicate a conscience ! however, in order that your 
Majesty's mind may be quite at rest, I will consult 
the casuists of my order." 

A few days later the confessor assured the 
King that the matter in question was not one to 
cause scruples, since a monarch is always, and in 
any case, the real owner of all the possessions in 
his kingdom. " You have relieved my mind very 
much," sighed the King, " now I shall feel at peace 
about this," and the tax was imposed. 

Father Le Tellier exercised his ruthless power 
with all the more violence, because he could not 
but fear that his days were limited. The Jesuits 
were loathed, their tyranny still held many souls 
in bondage ; but rebellion was astir, and the 
number of Jesuit confessors whose supreme 
ministrations at death-beds had been deliberately 
refused, was becoming the scandal of the order. 
It happened more and more frequently that the 
spirit standing on the threshold of Death cast off 
its bondage, and there were some striking 
defections. Monsieur le Prince himself, father of 
the Duchesse du Maine and courtier par excellence 
declared his religious standing at the last by an 



THE ROSE OF SAVOY 95 

act of stupendous independence. He closed his 
doors to his own Jesuit confessor, and sent for the 
P^re la Tour, a member of the Oratorians, and 
the bete noire of the Jesuits. A Stuart princess, 
Louisa Mary, followed suit; she refused on her 
death-bed to give admittance to her Jesuit con- 
fessor, and sent instead for a poor priest of the 
parish of Saint-Germain des Pres. 

The Church and the State, traditions and laws, 
all that had been and had appeared immutable, 
had reached an unexpected turning point — and 
France was about to enter the tragic year of 
1712. A few months before the Dauphin had died, 
and the country had mourned but little over 
this loss, all hopes being centred round his son, 
the Due de Bourgogne. To him life had given of 
its best gifts ; unbounded energy, a clear vision, a 
rich imagination, wisdom and sympathy beyond 
the ken of his contemporaries, a passionate desire 
to realise great aspirations. His young wife, the 
Duchesse de Bourgogne, the Rose of Savoy, as 
history has caressingly named her, illumined 
the gloom of Versailles with the young light of 
her gaiety and of her charm. Louis XIV. 
idolised her; her naturalness and her spontaneity 
were as draughts of cool spring water to the 
jaded sensibility of Madame de Maintenon. The 
Court, while shaking its head over her im- 
petuosity, or envying her popularity, was conquered 



96 THE TRAGIC END 

by the rare quality of her youth and of her 
vitality. 

No heirs to the throne ever possessed the heart 
of the country more entirely than the Due and 
the Duchesse de Bourgogne. Alas ! before the 
second month of the year 1712 had reached its 
end both were lying dead on their bed of state, 
and the same funeral procession which carried 
their remains to Saint-Denis conveyed also the 
body of the little Due de Bretagne, their eldest 
son, who had died a few days after them. 

Then a panic seized the minds of the public, 
the word " poison " was whispered in dark corners, 
and grew into a rumour which arose threateningly, 
and mounted higher and higher, until the ugly tide 
besmirched the name of the King's own nephew, 
the Due d' Orleans. Public voice called him em- 
poisonneu7\ and the King, his judgment obscured by 
infection from public passion, very nearly yielded 
to his nephew's indignant request that he might 
be arrested publicly, and with him his famous 
master in chemistry, Hombert, and that both might 
be kept prisoners until the outrageous allegations 
made against them should either be proved or 
disproved. Luckily the King's arm was stayed 
in time, and the Royal House of France was saved 
from an action, the very finality of which would 
have indelibly impressed the public mind with 
a conviction of guilt. 





VI a 



HEAVY DAYS 97 

Passion subsided ; reason and the medical 
faculty spoke enlighteningly, the King himself 
remembered with what inner conviction he had 
once exclaimed : " Mon neveu est un fanfaron de 
crimes." Whatever the suspicions had been, the 
Due d'Orleans's guilt was evidently quite out of 
the question ; but as dramatic agitation died out, 
the gloom which settled upon the Court seemed 
the heavier. In the beginning of March 1712 
Madame de Maintenon writes to the Princesse 
des Ursins: 

" All is death here, Madame, life has fled from 
us ; this princess (the Duchesse de Bourgogne) put 
life into everything, charmed us all ; we feel still 
heavy and stunned with our loss, and every day 
makes us realise it more. I cannot see the King, 
nor think of this loss without utter despair." 

All that meant hope and youth seemed to 
have deserted Versailles ; of the sons of the 
Dauphin only one remained, and the policy which 
aimed ever at preventing younger sons from being 
dangerous rivals to the heir had been entirely 
successful in the case of the Due de Berry. The 
King had had many proofs of it, and was soon to 
witness a public exhibition of his grandson's pathetic 
incapability. In consequence of the treaties made 
at the close of the war of the Spanish succession, 
the Due de Berry was to sign, in the presence 
of the assembled Parliament, a formal renunciation 



98 THE TRAGIC END 

to all claims upon the Spanish throne; he was, 
upon this occasion, to repeat a very short speech 
which had been written for him, and which he had 
learned by heart. " Monsieur," he began, address- 
ing the President of the council, " Monsieur, . . ." 
and after vainly repeating that word five or six 
times he broke down entirely, and there was 
nothing left for Monsieur le President but to 
wait tactfully the length of time which the speech 
would have taken, and then to dispel the general 
embarrassment by answering it, as if it had been 
delivered. Thus at least the remote parts of the 
assembly hall could be under the illusion that the 
Prince had spoken. Duclos, who in his secret 
Memoirs, gives many details about this, tells of 
the Due's return to Versailles in gloomy silence 
and with downcast eyes, he tells of his passionate 
outburst, when he reached at last the privacy of 
his apartments. 

" I was a younger son, they were afraid of 
me," he sobbed, denouncing the unfairness of the 
education which had made him what he was, 
"they tried to make an idiot of me, and they 
have succeeded, they never taught me anything, 
except hunting ; I am incapable of doing anything 
else." 

So many healthy shoots had, in this way, been 
maimed and cut down to preserve the strength 
of the main trunk that now after the lightning 



THE DYING KING 99 

of fate had struck it, it stood strangely stripped 
and isolated. The heir to the throne was a child 
of two, whose feeble health struck dismay into 
the hearts of loyal subjects, and raised hopes in 
those disloyal ones who were beginning to count 
on it as a strong asset. The Due d'Orleans's party 
on one side, the Due du Maine's faction on the 
other, were busy building plans and hopes for a 
near future. Madame du Maine, without seeming 
to descend from the clouds where she dwelt with 
her sister divinities, her intellectual puzzles, and 
her complicated diversions, was yet secretly bracing 
herself to a political struggle. 

The King's apathy increased from day to day ; 
his body, so pitilessly trained to defy all onslaughts 
of old age and fatigue, seemed to show the same 
immunity as before ; he dressed, undressed, dined, 
supped, played cards, hunted, drove the Koyal 
coach under the perpetual observation of hundreds 
of critical courtiers. Madame de Maintenon may 
moan : " My poor head feels as if it had been 
quartered between four horses, . . ." but no com- 
plaint escapes from the King's lips. Only his spirit 
sinks more and more into the slough of indifference 
and despondency — no effort to rouse him is of any 
avail, and Madame de Maintenon driven by black 
despair into total recklessness of expression is 
heard to exclaim : " Quel supplice d'avoir a amuser 
un homme qui n'est plus amusable ! " 



CHAPTER IX 

THE king's will 

The reproof quoted at the end of Chapter VII. 
was undeserved ; the Due du Maine had worked 
hard in his own subterranean way, and had amply 
proved that his talent for intrigue could be relied 
upon. In concert with Madame de Maintenon, 
his faithful ally, he had diligently helped to 
promote all those lapses from etiquette, those 
confusions of ranks and rights which mark the 
end of Louis XIV. reign, and which were so pro- 
pitious to a situation irreguliere. What barriers 
could not be overthrown at a time when the old 
order of things had been so entirely reversed that 
a bourgeois minister now addressed as " Monsieur " 
an hereditary noble, who in reply called him 
"Monseigneur," and when Madame de Maintenon's 
decision to remain standing at her receptions had 
levelled all hereditary rights to sit, to a polite 
obligation to stand. 

Monsieur du Maine had ever been vigilant at 
his post, watching for the opportune moment to 

increase his credit, hiding under the mask of 

100 



A CLIMBING FAMILY 101 

filial devotion his determination to conquer any 
possible chance of precedence, to pick up any 
stray favour which might fall from the King's 
hands. His efforts had been well rewarded ; from 
year to year his family had risen to greater con- 
sideration. After being declared legitimes, his 
brother, the Comte de Toulouse, and he had 
been raised to the dignity of Peers of the Realm, 
they had later on been granted equal rights with 
the Princes of the blood, and in 1714, after death 
had so fatally decimated the Royal Family of 
France, they had tasted their final triumph in 
listening to the proclamation which declared them 
heirs to the throne. 

These were giddy heights to tread for the 
bastard cripple and his poupee du sang, but 
Madame du Maine was prepared to climb higher 
still ; she walked on the clouds as in her natural 
element, exulting over the realisation of that 
which she had expected with perfect confidence. 
The Due, on the other hand, lived in daily 
terror of the abysses which loomed by the side 
of the proud heights. He read mysterious threats 
in the omniscient Saint- Simon, whenever he met 
that implacable inquisitor, and he could not think 
without a shudder of the awe-inspiring words 
which the King had addressed to him on a day 
which had been one of the memorable landmarks 

in his progress. The Royal will had just been 

g2 



102 THE KING'S WILL 

signed, and the King, pointing to it, and inclined 
perhaps to take a revenge for the coercion to 
which he had been submitted, had thrown a 
significant glance at his ambitious cripple : " You 
wished it," he said, " and it is done, but remember 
that without me you would be nothing, and see 
that you keep your power when I am gone — if 
you can ! " 

It had been the intoxication which comes of 
success which had plunged Madame du Maine 
into the reckless extravagance of the Gi^andes 
Nuits. *' The Princesse's taste for pleasure," reports 
Mademoiselle Delaunay, "had then reached its 
zenith." Towards the end of the year 1714, 
however, there are new symptoms in the air, 
and though they are not yet noticeable to many, 
the keen mind of the chronicler of Sceaux has 
detected and understood them. 

" The King's health was beginning to sink 
visibly," she remarks going straight to the root of 
the matter, " no one wished to refer to it and every 
one affected to disbelieve it, but in the midst of 
the pleasures which seemed to solely occupy her, 
Madame du Maine was more watchful than ever 
over the fortune of the house with which she 
had allied herself and the establishment of its 
power on a sure basis." 

The Duchesse felt, at this important juncture, 
how indispensable it was to know fully the 




Loi^sj1li:xandrjeDk.Bo, 



timeDe Fkanck 

'SFtJs rU>7iif-eJ ^i^Aiy .J^tuj £? 



LOUIS DE BOURBON, 
Comte de Toulouse. 



To face p. I02. 



INDECISION 103 

decisions expressed in the King's will, and in 
order to gain that knowledge she decided for 
the first time to interfere openly with the affairs 
of the State. So far she had only worked through 
the secret agency of the Duke, goading on 
pitilessly what she called his " damnable apathy," 
railing at his fears, ridiculing his hesitations, and 
terrorising him into a frenzy of action. His 
native prudence had saved the situation in spite 
of all, and now, as events proved, her incon- 
sequence was to endanger it seriously. She had 
determined to gain a knowledge of the King's 
will, but even whilst working for this end she 
was seized most inopportunely with one of her 
father's fits of indecision. 

After having with great difficulty obtained, 
through Madame de Maintenon's intermission, the 
permission to see the Royal will, she suddenly 
refused to take advantage of this, on account of 
the condition that the knowledge gained should 
entail absolute and inviolable secrecy. This con- 
dition, she maintained, would paralyse all efforts 
by which she might otherwise have fortified her 
position. Her arguments were not particularly 
conclusive, nor did they appear so to those chiefly 
concerned : the Due du Maine and the Comte de 
Toulouse. Should the will be read ? should it not 
be read ? the question was discussed for several 
days, and at last decided in the negative. But 



104 THE KING'S WILL 

hardly had an intimation of this been despatched to 
the King, when the decision was bitterly deplored 
by those who had taken it, and a council was 
appointed to consider the best means of repairing 
this grievous error. The council, composed of 
the premier president. Monsieur de Mesmes, 
Monsieur de Malezieu, and Monsieur de Valincourt 
(of the Comte de Toulouse's household) deliberated 
at length in the presence of the parties concerned. 
The invaluable advantage of having a full know- 
ledge of the will having been refused, nothing 
remained but to beg humbly for a partial know- 
ledge, one clause of it at least. Which clause 
should be chosen as the most significant ? — more 
deliberations ensued. The Duchesse was as sure 
of being able to discover the " magic unit " which 
would contain the whole, as she had once been 
convinced of finding the " magic square " ; but 
her extravagant schemes having been rejected one 
by one, the Comte de Toulouse's proposal was 
at last accepted. He had, with the wisdom 
which was to keep his craft steady in the midst 
of the universal wreck, hit upon the very point 
which was most vital, and which was in a way 
the "magic unit." 

The point at issue was to discover if Louis XIV. 
was re-establishing the claims of his grandson, 
Fehpe V. of Spain, to the throne of France; 
failing which, the future King being still a child, 



BAD TACTICS 105 

the authority would naturally devolve upon the 
Due d'Orleans, the King's nephew, and he would 
be the one rival against whom all forces should 
be concentrated. The request was presented and 
granted, and it was then known that Felipe V. 
was still barred from the line of succession. This 
discovery led to a second very grave mistake in 
the tactics of the court of Sceaux. In order to 
ingratiate themselves with a man who might be a 
power, although they did not mean him to be the 
power, they informed the Due d'Orleans of that 
most weighty of the King's decisions. 

Deliberately to put a weapon into the hand of 
the man from whom you fear an attack seems 
absolute madness. At that time, however, the 
respective position of the Due d'Orleans and the 
Due du Maine was not clearly defined in their 
own minds ; each underrated the other's chances, 
the one from ignorance of Madame de Maintenon's 
successful intrigues, the other from a knowledge 
of the King's embitterment towards his nephew. 

The information which was sent to the Regent, 
coupled with congratulations, seems at the best 
a very great inconsequence on the part of a 
house which had clearly shown its determination 
to stand aloof from the House of Orleans. The 
injudicious service rendered by the Due du Maine 
to his opponent brought no advantage to the giver 
and was of the utmost importance to him who 



106 THE KING'S WILL 

received it. The latter had not been popular, 
except in a small circle of his own ; but now he 
applied himself diligently to the conquest of the 
great nobles and dignitaries of the realm. 

" Very lavish of his promises," thus Mademoiselle 
Delaunay judges him, " and considering his word 
as of no account, he pledged himself to satisfy all 
demands in the event of his becoming the master. 
By similar means he won over the Parliament and 
had recourse to a thousand intrigues in order to 
get his friends and partisans into power, so that they 
might be of use to him later on. The President 
was to all appearances devoted to the House of 
Maine, and yet little help could be derived from 
him : he was a great courtier, but a mediocre man, 
with agreeable manners and pleasing wit, but weak 
and timid and possessed of all those faults which 
help a man to please and prevent him from being 
usefuL" 

The successes achieved by the Due d'Orleans 
caused great perturbation at Sceaux — moreover 
a sudden aggravation in the King's state plunged 
the Due and the Duchesse du Maine into the 
utmost consternation. They had not yet given 
up all hope of getting a fuller knowledge of the 
Royal will, and of persuading the King to take 
during his lifetime those measures which would 
ensure his son's power after his death. If the 
end should come before this had been contrived, 
they felt that their cause might be lost indeed. 



DEATH OF THE KING 107 

Madame du Maine forsook at a moment's notice 
the engrossing pleasures of Sceaux, and hastened 
to Versailles, in order at least to gain Madame de 
Maintenon's ear, if she could not gain access to 
the King. She found a court already disorganised 
by the approaching events, and a woman in whom 
all other interests had been swept away by the 
force of the coming catastrophe. Madame de 
Maintenon could be of no use at this juncture, 
and little help could be expected from the Due 
du Maine who stood day after day in stupefied 
despair by his father's bedside. At last the secrets, 
on the discovery of which so many efforts had been 
wasted, fell spontaneously from the King's lips a 
few days before his death. 

They were certainly of an astonishing nature ; 
during the last years of his reign the clever 
politician had entirely died in Louis XIV., leaving 
only the feeble old man, harassed by intrigues, 
who yielded wearily to persuasion and coercion, 
with an utter disregard of the consequences. The 
following were the King's testamentary disposi- 
tions ; instead of awarding the Regency to the 
Due d'Orleans, he had formed a conseil de 
regerice the members of which had all been 
chosen by him, his nephew being only appointed 
nominal president of the conseil. Every question 
discussed in the council was to be decided solely 
by a majority of votes. The Due du Maine, on 



108 THE KING'S WILL 

the other hand, was apparently overwhelmed with 
bounties, the guardianship of the young King, the 
superintendence of his education, the responsibility 
of his personal safety, and the commandership over 
the Royal Bodyguard. The King's last will 
seemed to be an absolute challenge to the mainten- 
ance of public order ; on the one hand, slights and 
no measures to prevent a vengeance, on the other, 
lavish favours and no power to uphold them. 

The Due du Maine had hoped for one of those 
compromises, so dear to his heart, by which one 
may climb the summits, while yet seeming to be 
treading the lowly plains ; but there was no trace 
of diplomacy in this last work of the King's hand, 
and objections, representations were of no avail. 
The King was weary of complications and turmoil, 
and nothing could raise him from his state of 
apathy. 



CHAPTER X 

RIVALRIES AND CONSPIRACIES 

On the first day of September 1715 King 
Louis XIV. died, on the second of September 
Parliament was to assemble in order to consider 
the question of the Regency — twenty-four hours 
of mortal suspense for the Due and the Duchesse 
du Maine ! Would Parliament sanction the 
Royal will, would it annul it in parts ? Alas, 
the signs by which events are read beforehand 
were now in favour of the last conjecture, and 
yet ... in the excited minds of the Due and 
the Duchesse, past scenes rose up to flatter them 
with vain hopes. They saw once more in imagina- 
tion, as they had once seen in reahty, the lifeless 
bodies of the Dauphin and of the Dauphine lying 
on their bed of state, and the Court filing past to 
render them their last homage. The crowd, massed 
round the vast hall, looks on in mute grief, but 
as the Due d'Orleans approaches the body of the 
Dauphine, the beloved of all, a threatening murmur 
rises like an angry sea and the sinister whisper : 

empoisonneur, emjpoisonneur encompasses him on 

109 



110 RIVALRIES AND CONSPIRACIES 

all sides. Now the funeral procession winds 
through the streets of Paris, and an infuriated 
mob pursues the Due d'Orleans with threats and 
insults. In front of the Palais Royal, the Due's 
residence, indignation rises so high that "for a 
moment there were reasons to fear the worst." ^ 

But since then three years have passed bringing 
forgetfulness to unstable minds, and even Parlia- 
ment, which once shared the public feeling, and 
used its influence to strengthen it, could no more 
be relied upon. The Due du Maine wavered 
between fear and hope ; could it be possible that 
the same Parliament, which three years before 
had shuddered at the enormity of the crime, 
would now deliberately elect the alleged criminal 
to the most responsible post in the State, and 
entrust to him the frail life of the future King, 
a child of five? It seemed incredible, and yet, 
all through the long hours of the day, and the 
still longer watches of the night, the Due and 
the Duchesse feared it in spite of themselves. 

A significant demonstration, which had taken 
place only a few days before the King's death, 
had revealed in which direction blew the wind 
of popular favour. The King, having ordered a 
general review of the troops, and feeling unable 
to preside at it in person, had granted to the Due 
du Maine the very signal honour of representing 
him. The Due was cantering proudly at the 

^ Saint-Simon. 



ORLEANS REGENT 111 

head of his battalions, when the Due d'Orleans 
appeared upon the scene ; then an astonishing 
manoeuvre took place, a manoeuvre which seemed 
entirely unpremeditated, and was all the more 
impressive for it — with one accord the brilliant 
escort of the Due du Maine turned, and followed 
the Due d'Orleans. . . . 

The second day of September dawned at last 
and realised the worst previsions of the House of 
Maine. The King was dead, his wishes were 
powerless. Parliament ignored them with insult- 
ing deliberateness, and appointed the Due d'Orleans 
Regent of France. His decrees were, it is true, 
to be checked by a committee, but it was not 
probable that the latter would have much weight. 
The new Regent declared in his own facile way 
that "he was delighted to feel his hands tied 
against all evil doing, and free to commit all 
good deeds ..." and proceeded to prove it by 
forcing Parliament to annul the appointment of 
the Due de Maine as commander of the Swiss 
Guard. The safety of the little King being 
dependent on a sufficient military force to assure 
it, the Due de Maine saw himself compelled to 
give up his guardianship over the King also, and 
at the end of that fateful day he saw himself 
reduced to a position which was in reality nothing 
more than the chief tutorship over a child of five. 

The Due and the Duchesse du Maine took this 
crushing turn of Fortune's wheel each according 



112 RIVALRIES AND CONSPIRACIES 

to his or her own peculiar temperament; the 
Due with a silent and dogged determination 
not to yield, the Duchesse with loud recrimina- 
tions and defiant threats. They agreed on one 
point only, namely, that the apartments in the 
Tuileries which belonged by right to those 
attached to the person of the King, were not to 
be despised, and they installed themselves there 
after the little King's return from Vincennes. 

A few months passed in relative serenity, and 
again some semblance of elation seemed to reign 
in the Duchesse's circle. Now that the disappear- 
ance of Madame de Maintenon's sombre draperies 
had given the signal for a lifting of that pall of 
sadness which had so long depressed the Court, 
the Duchesse was not unwilling to have her share 
of Court life, and to mix a little gaiety with her 
political strenuousness. 

According to Mademoiselle Delaunay every one, 
herself excepted, had reason to rejoice over their 
change of residence; she, however, had found at 
the Tuileries the inevitable reduit allotted to her 
as usual, without a window or a fireplace. But 
there were compensations — 

" I was in Paris," she says, " where it had 
always been my wish to live, and my residence, 
in spite of its many drawbacks, saw plenty of 
good company. Since I have been in a position 
to receive my friends more comfortably, I have 



THE ABBE DE CHAULIEU 113 

not known many to seek me ! I was young 
then, and that is worth more than anything one 
can acquire, after the loss of that inestimable 
advantage ! " 

She seems to have had a very good time indeed, 
so much so that the old Abbe de Chaulieu, one 
of her devoted friends, ardent in his admiration 
in spite of his eighty years and more, thought it 
his duty to warn her against coquetry. 

" I assured him," she remarks, " that my coquetry 
was only a dire necessity to please, in order to 
make up for the discomforts of my lodgings. . . . 
I gave him my word of honour, which I have 
kept faithfully, that as soon as I should have a 
window and a fireplace, I should give up my 
endeavours ! " 

The old Abbe was a treasure, a rare flower of 
that theory of Platonic love, held in such honour 
among the adherents of Descartes 's philosophy. 
He was blind, and his fiery imagination adorned 
Mademoiselle Delaunay with all the graces and all 
the charms. " I deserved none of the epithets 
he bestowed upon me," says the object of his 
delusions, and she does not hesitate to prove it 
later on in a portrait which she draws of herself, 
according to one of the favourite customs of the 
time. 

" Delaunay is of medium height, thin, dried up, 
and disagreeable. Her character and her mind are 



114 RIVALRIES AND CONSPIRACIES 

just like her face ; there is nothing wrong about 
them, but they have no charm. Her bad fortune 
has added to her value, inasmuch as, according to 
a common prejudice, people who have neither 
family nor wealth, must also lack cultivation ; 
consequently the little culture she has wins her 
easy appreciation. 

" Delaunay has had an excellent education, and 
from it she has derived all the good there is in her : 
principles and a certain elevation of mind, and 
some fixed rules for her actions — rules which the 
force of habit has turned into a second nature. 
Her one folly has always been the wish to be 
absolutely reasonable, and, just as women imagine 
they must have a fine figure because they feel the 
discomfort of tight stays, so she has believed 
herself very sensible, because her commonsense 
has ever been a discomfort and a burden to her. 

" She has never been able to check the vivacity 
of her temper, nor even to reduce it to a semblance 
of moderation ; this has often caused her to be 
disagreeable to her superiors, burdensome to society, 
and quite unbearable to her subordinates ; luckily 
Fate has not put her in a position to subject many 
to her vexatious moods." 

Though this portrait was drawn some twenty 
years later, it may have fitted the original 
then in a few points, but the good Abbe de 
Chaulieu would have allowed none of the defects 
alluded to. As a worthy classical scholar of his 
period, he compares her to all the goddesses of 



AN INSISTENT FRIEND 115 

mythology, and proclaims himself now bound in 
chains like Prometheus, now pierced by all the 
arrows of Cupid's quiver. His letters and poems, 
irreproachable in style, were marred by one defect ; 
their author, being blind, had to entrust the 
writing of them to his page boy, who was wholly 
innocent of the science of orthography, and must 
have penned strange productions. In spite of the 
wild flights of his imagination, he must have had 
plenty of good, sound commonsense, that dear 
kind-hearted old Abb^ ; and his practical efforts 
to cheer Mademoiselle Delaunay's monotonous 
existence were quite as frequent as his poetical 
ecstasies. 

" The abb^ often proposed to add presents to 
the incense which he offered me," we read in the 
Memoirs, " and one day, annoyed by the insistence 
with which he begged me to accept a thousand 
pistoles, I said to him : ' Let me advise you, as a 
proof of my gratitude for your generous offers, 
not to make similar ones to many women, you 
might find one who would take you at your word ! ' 
' Oh I ' he replied, ' I know quite well to whom I 
am addressing these ! ' His naive answer made me 
laugh. He often exhorted me to adorn myself 
more, and tried to make me feel ashamed of not 
being more elegantly dressed. ' Abbe,' I used to 
say to him, * Je me pare de ce qui me manque.' 

" Having no other means to give me pleasure 
than by his attentions, he increased them un- 
ceasingly. He wrote to me every morning, and 



116 RIVALRIES AND CONSPIRACIES 

came to see me every day, unless T put off his 
visit. The letters he sent me enquired into my 
wishes for the day ; and if I preferred his carriage 
to his society, he sent me the former without 
demur, and I could dispose of it as I liked." 

If Mademoiselle Delaunay's social position had 
improved since the household had moved to the 
Tuileries, her duties as first waiting - woman had 
not become lighter. For some time past anxieties 
had deprived Madame du Maine of what small 
inclination to sleep she had ever possessed, and 
the tales with which one of her women had been 
wont to read her to sleep now failed in their 
effect. 

With unshaken confidence in the soporific 
virtues of these masterpieces of inanity, the 
Duchesse declared that the reader was at fault, not 
the matter read, and she transferred the office to 
Mademoiselle Delaunay. The truth was that she 
longed for the contact of a mind able to share the 
burdens of her own, and to help her more efficiently 
than could a mere droning voice to get through 
the interminable hours of the night. 

More or less fantastical fears had agitated her 
first months at the Tuileries; but now a black 
storm was surely though slowly gathering on the 
horizon, and a very tangible peril was at hand. 

So far the Due du Maine had only lost a power 
which he had really never possessed, except during 



THE RIVAL LEGITIMATES 117 

a few brief moments of exultant expectation, but 
now he was threatened with the loss of the very 
titles and prerogatives which alone assured his social 
position. The attack was led by the Duchesse du 
Maine's own nephew, commonly called Monsieur 
le Due. It was he who, in the ensuing quarrel 
which assumed gigantic proportions, and is known 
as the war between les princes legitimes and 
les princes legitimes, headed the side of the 
legitimates. A sorry looking leader to represent 
high lineage, the pure and proud blood of the 
Royal Family of France ! He was a hideous, 
one - eyed wretch, whose physical repulsiveness 
was only equalled by his natural malevolence. 

His enmity against the house of Maine had 
begun long before, on the occasion of a law-suit 
regarding the will and property of the late 
Monsieur le Prince, the father of the Duchesse du 
Maine. Monsieur le Due had been on the losing 
side, and had sworn vengeance against the winners. 
While waiting for a big opportunity, he had not 
missed any chance for petty persecutions, refusing, 
for instance, to sign deeds in which Monsieur du 
Maine was taking his legal rank of prince of the 
royal blood, and affecting on all occasions to deny 
the dignities conferred upon him by the King. 

Among the multitudinous promises given 
by the Due d'Orleans, before his accession to 
the Regency, was a formal one made to Monsieur 



118 RIVALRIES AND CONSPIRACIES 

le Due, to annul the royal deerees, whieh 
gave the princes legitimes their rank and their 
prerogatives ; he had, however, found this promise 
as difficult to keep as most of the others. 

He realised how fatal it would be to foment 
further dissensions in a State already divided 
against itself. Moreover his own wife, the 
Duchesse d'Orleans, was a sister of the Due 
du Maine, and however little respect he had 
shown her, he was loth to raise the cry which 
would again draw public attention to the stain 
on his own escutcheon. So he dallied in his 
own true way, and strove to keep in with both 
parties ; fearing the anger of Monsieur le Due 
and his partisans, he refused to the Comte d'Eu, 
second son of the Due du Maine, the privilege 
by which, as a prince of the royal blood, he 
was entitled to a seat in Parliament on the 
completion of his fifteenth year, but he also 
declined to take active steps in the cause of 
the legitimate princes. 

Monsieur le Due was not a man to waste 
his anger in fruitless waiting, and with the 
Prince de Conti and the Comte de Charolais, 
he drew up against the legitimes a petition which 
he addressed straight to the King. The party 
attacked retaliated by means of another petition, 
which demanded that the question at issue should 
be adjourned to the time of the King's majority. 



AN INVOLVED LAW-SUIT 119 

The Regent, pressed hard on all sides, shifted 
his responsibility as far as was possible, by 
electing a committee which was to decide the 
claims of both parties. Thereupon Paris witnessed 
the development of one of the most interminable 
law procedures that has ever excited public 
curiosity, racked the brains of lawyers, and 
scattered abroad the dust of thousands of 
ancient documents. On either side accusation 
was piled upon accusation, refutation pitted 
against refutation, plea against plea, precedent 
against precedent. 

The Duchesse du Maine was one of the most 
passionate amongst the combatants ; she had 
never doubted her easy supremacy in all things, 
and when, through the stress of circumstances, 
she was forced to attack the involved questions 
of the law, she felt persuaded that she would 
find the conclusive documents and arguments 
which would ensure a brilliant victory to her 
side. Meanwhile the whole intellectual coterie 
of Sceaux was pressed into the service of the 
great science of chicanery — no more sonnets or 
odes, no more delightful readings of the Anti- 
Lucrece. Monsieur de Malezieu was forced into 
the paths where an oracle can be most oracular, 
though he secretly despised his new chances, 
and even Monsieur de Polignac was bidden 
to forego the delights of aesthetic discussions. 



120 RIVALRIES AND CONSPIRACIES 

Only the Due du Maine was excluded from the 
common interest ; the Duchesse had lost her 
faith in his efficiency as a diplomat ; silence 
was the watch -word in his presence, and he 
was greeted by a mysterious hush whenever he 
presumed to enter his wife's apartments. 

As a token of her rising favour, Mademoiselle 
Delaunay was admitted into the conspiracy ; but, 
alas, her turn came at night when hour after 
hour she had to sit by the Duchesse's bedside. 

" The greatest part of the night," she says, " was 
spent in laborious researches. The enormous 
volumes piled upon the bed like so many 
mountains crushing her made Madame du Maine 
seem a veritable Encelas buried under Mount 
Etna ! I helped her with her work, turned over 
endless old chronicles, ancient and modern books 
of law, until at last the excess of fatigue drove 
the Princess to think of taking some rest. Then 
I had to read her to sleep, and after that only 
I was free to seek in my turn sleep which very 
often would not come." 

Mademoiselle Delaunay's task became more 
arduous still, when the rumour of Madame du 
Maine's researches began to spread through Paris 
and to attract all those needy adventurers or 
would-be savants, who are ever on the lookout 
for a chance to make their problematic fortune. 
As Madame du Maine had no time to test 



AN ORIGINAL 121 

their abilities, the task devolved upon her 

first waiting - woman who, to judge from her 

descriptions, was often sorely puzzled by her 
interlocutors. 

" Hundreds of obscure people came to offer their 
help and to bring their meagre discoveries ; most 
of them were sent to me, or at least advised 
to come to me. One appeared, among others, 
who was renowned for his great learning ; but 
he was more of a Hebrew than a Frenchman, 
and more conversant with the customs of the 
Chaldeans than with those of this country. He 
knew no court except that of Semiramis, and 
yet he asked to come to ours with his ancient lore 
which could be of little use for our present 
affair ; precedents taken from the family of 
Nimrod were not likely to be conclusive in 
the case of Louis XIV. 's family ! A day was, 
however, fixed for an interview with him, and he 
was referred to me. When he arrived I was 
assisting at Madame du Maine's toilet, and 
somebody came to call me. She said to me: 
* Don't go, let him come in here; I will see 
him.' He came into her room, persuaded that 
he was being taken to one of her waiting- 
women. The sumptuous apartment, the para- 
phernalia of the toilet, the number of people 
in waiting, did not dispel his first idea. He 
called the Duchesse, ' Mademoiselle ' all through 
his conversation with her, and went away without 
having a suspicion that he had been speaking to 
anybody but me." 



122 RIVALRIES AND CONSPIRACIES 

Strange dinner and supper parties were among 
the unexpected consequences of the Duchesses 
legal activity. Most of those improvised oracles 
and Pythonesses vi^ho came to offer their wisdom 
were more or less famished individuals, who vowed 
with charming naivete that their advice was always 
superior during or after a meal. One or two 
picturesque pages in the Memoirs are devoted to 
these feasts. 

" This traffic of erudition put me into relation 
with all kinds of people. One of the most 
tenacious of them was a certain Abbe Lecamus, 
introduced by a sham countess who was in reality 
nothing but a beggar. They both played a part 
in our great comedy, though their platitude made 
them quite unworthy to appear in it. Among our 
would-be oracles there was also a former monk 
whom the countess introduced to us, armed with 
his writings. She had persuaded him that, in order 
to see them truly appreciated, he must offer me 
a supper at his house. It could not be avoided. 
I went to it accompanied by our famished countess 
who was beside herself at the prospect of a meal. 
I found in the house a company which looked 
more as if it belonged to the world of shades than 
to this. On the face of the master of the house, 
who was rich but extremely miserly, one could 
read quite plainly his regret at having to feed us 
at all. My annoyance was as great as his, and 
from utter boredom, or for want of something 
better to do, I seized a pair of tongs and began 



QUACKS AND ECCENTRICS 123 

to poke the fire which was rather low. I got hold 
of something which my treacherous sight made 
me take for a charred log which had got displaced, 
and which I pushed back. Alas ! it proved to be 
a very black chocolate pot, full of chocolate ! It 
had nor occurred to me to imagine such an 
addition to the feast, and it was indeed as much 
out of place as my imaginary log. The liquid was 
upset, extinguishing the fire and the mirth of the 
guests, and throwing our host into the utmost 
consternation. To comfort him, 1 suggested that 
one could very well do without chocolate after a 
supper, and I am convinced that he never brewed 
any again, in order to be sure of not meeting 
henceforth with such a sad accident. 

" I went with the countess and the Abbe to 
another party, still more eccentric. They showed 
me another intriguante in possession, as they 
said, of the most important secrets. She was a 
friend of a certain Abbe de Lerac, who had written 
either for or against Monsieur le Due, and could 
throw great light upon our subject. Madame la 
Duchesse du Maine, like those patients who are 
not satisfied with clever doctors, but must resort to 
quacks also, listened to whatever advice came, and 
then sent me out on voyages of discovery. All 
the knowledge that I gained from Dame Dupuis, 
as she was called, was an absolute conviction 
of her total uselessness. However, our people 
insisted, and vowed that after a meal she would 
speak like Pythia on her tripod : all their intrigues 
evidently tended only towards securing some good 
morsels. I was driven to sitting down to supper 



124 RIVALRIES AND CONSPIRACIES 

with that band of brigands. They took me to 
a kind of tumbled down barn, where the feast 
was to take place. We winded in and out of 
dark passages, and crossed floors worn to a thin 
transparency ; these weird haunts made me expect 
terrifying things. I did not know whether I was 
being taken to a witches' sabbath, whether I 
should find myself among cut-throats, or some- 
thing even worse. The assembly, when I found 
it at last, did not look re-assuring; it seemed 
made up of people well fitted for uncouth 
mysteries, the songs which cheered the feast were 
in harmony with the rest, and the wine which 
Dame Dupuis drank freely during the meal did 
not lure out of her any of her profound secrets. 
She reappeared later on with her ambiguous 
speeches, upon which no light could be thrown. 
She may have been a spy, but whatever she was, 
our deaUngs with her led to nothing, and I only 
mention her because her name appears in the 
authentic documents of our great law procedure." 

Alas for the fruitless interviews, the wasted 
feasts, the sleepless nights ! The case of the 
legitivies was judged and lost. In July 1717 
Parliament revoked the royal edict which had 
granted to the princes legitimes the right to 
succeed to the throne, and divested them of their 
title of princes of the blood. 

This catastrophe plunged Madame du Maine 
into the utmost despair. She began by over- 
whelming with reproaches that ever-patient 



AN INTRIGUE WITH SPAIN 125 

scapegoat, her husband, and then proceeded to 
reflect over means of retaMation. Before very 
long her over - wrought imagination was filled 
with visions of the battles of an avenging war. 

The first Memoirs about the Fronde were just 
then being published, and the Duchesse du Maine 
had no difficulty in imagining herself a second 
Mademoiselle de Montpensier, riding into besieged 
cities at the head of a victorious army and point- 
ing formidable guns at the very windows of the 
arch-enemy, the Due d'Orleans. The main body 
of those victorious troops should be Spanish ; it 
was to Spain that she awarded in her mind the 
glory of playing, after her, an honourable second 
in the heroic epos ! So far her demands upon 
Felipe V. had been of a more modest nature ; 
she had only asked his support in favour of her 
party's request that the States General should be 
assembled, in order to revise the last decisions 
taken by Parliament. That petition was already 
on its way to Spain, and had been entrusted to 
a Jesuit. 

Up to that point, the Duchesse's actions had 
been remarkable for their unwonted moderation, 
but when rumours reached her of an intrigue 
with Spain in which she might join, it was not 
in her power to resist. All round her, events 
were beginning to show that the camp of the 
legitimes was not the only one in which the 



126 RIVALRIES AND CONSPIRACIES 

Regent was anathematised; unfulfilled promises, 
violated oaths were raising on all sides anger 
and rebellion. Madame du Maine would have 
liked to have made common cause with all the 
discontented ; it was regrettable that chance led her 
to league herself with two of the most witless — 
the Comte de Laval and the Marquis de Pompadour. 
The former, whose mind was not over-fertile in 
ideas, was further hindered in the enunciation of 
the few he had by having to wear a kind of 
sinister looking muzzle to hold up his jaw which 
had been smashed during the wars. The second 
of the conspirators was not only a fool, but a 
coward to boot, and he was to bear himself with 
pitiable weakness in the hour of peril. The two 
were nevertheless received with open arms, and 
under their distinguished patronage, Madame du 
Maine entered into negotiations with the Spanish 
ambassador, the famous Prince of Cellamare. 

The Spanish Embassy was already under 
observation and specially marked out by the 
Regent's spies, but this only added to the 
Duchesse's delight at embarking in perilous enter- 
prises. She arranged thrilling interviews in the 
dead of the night, and in out of the way places, 
to which the Comte de Laval, disguised as a 
coachman, had the privilege of driving the Spanish 
ambassador, mysterious meetings under one of the 
Seine bridges in Paris, in which Mademoiselle 



ENERGETIC PENMANSHIP 127 

Delaunay very unwillingly played a prominent 
part. 

Many were the confabulations and many the 
writings. The Duchesse had laid in a good store 
of encre sympathique ; she used it in profusion, 
and it afforded her as much pleasure in itself as 
the drawing up of her political manifestoes. She 
had composed one in particular, destined to point 
out to the Spanish Government the inadvisability 
of approving a treatise of the Quadruple Alliance, 
which was too favourable to the Regent. We 
must believe if we accept Mademoiselle Delaunay's 
authority, that it was an excellent production, and 
Cellamare got it safely into the hands of his 
sovereign. Another composition, alas, had a less 
enviable fate. It owed its origin and ill-starred 
career to the following circumstances. The Spanish 
ambassador, who does not seem to have had a 
high opinion of his own or of his country's 
epistolary talent, asked Madame du Maine 
to draw up a model of two letters supposed 
to have been sent by his Government, one 
addressed to the King, the other to Parliament 
on the subject of the convocation of the States 
General. 

Madame du Maine entrusted this task to the 
two strongest minds among her conspirators, 
Monsieur de Malezieu and the Cardinal de 
Polignac. They produced a masterpiece, as was 



128 RIVALRIES AND CONSPIRACIES 

to be expected ; but, alas, the fact that Monsieur 
de Pohgnac was a Cardinal as well as a con- 
spirator proved fatal to the cause. As he was 
putting the last stroke of his pen to the copy 
of the letter, the bells for the King's mass began 
to ring. The Cardinal, who " always acquitted 
himself in the most seemly manner " ^ of his duties 
as Grand Aumonier, hurried away, leaving to 
Monsieur de Malezieu the care of destroying the 
rough copy of the document. 

The oracle of Sceaux was likely to be skilled 
in this peculiar occupation, as Messieurs de Laval 
and De Pompadour were wont to cover an incon- 
ceivable amount of paper with the ramblings of 
their incoherent minds, and upon him devolved 
generally the task of destroying these divagations, 
as soon as the authors' backs were turned. On 
that fatal day, however, whether from negligence 
or from a certain pride in his joint authorship of 
the document, Monsieur de Malezieu did not at 
once destroy the tell - tale paper, and when he 
wished to burn it, it was nowhere to be found. 
He spent several days in fruitless search; the 
missing paper remained undiscovered, and did not 
reappear until the ill-fated day when all those 
concerned with its contents were praying most 
devoutly for its eternal disappearance. 

^ D'Argenson, '' Memoires." 



CHAPTER XI 

HUMILIATION OF THE HOUSE OF MAINE 

While the Duchesse du Maine was relishing to 
the utmost the mystery and secrecy of her pohtical 
deahngs, the Regent was being informed of all the 
movements of the conspirators. He feared them 
but little, these dangerous enemies of the State, 
but he was determined to expose their proceedings 
as a justification for the final overthrow of the 
House of Maine. He had at last decided to enter 
into an alliance with George I. of England — an 
alliance strongly advocated by Lord Stair and 
Cardinal Dubois. If difficulties were to arise in 
connection with the succession, England's help 
against Spain would be invaluable ; and the 
question of the English alliance was put before 
Parliament. The Due du Maine, clearly seeing 
the drift of the question, and carried away by his 
passion, swerved for once from the path of prudence, 
and violently opposed the alliance, whereupon the 
Regent was heard to exclaim on leaving the 
Assembly : " Monsieur du Maine has taken off his 

129 I 



130 HUMILIATION OF THE MAINES 

mask at last ! " Whilst deliberating on the possi- 
bilities opened up by such an unprecedented piece 
of imprudence, the Due d'Orleans was by degrees 
raising the strongest advocates of his policy to the 
most prominent offices of the State, and all those 
in office who were suspected of even the slightest 
connection with the opposition were discharged 
one after the other. Monsieur le President de 
Mesmes was soon obliged secretly to warn Madame 
du Maine that one of her staunchest friends. 
Monsieur de Noailles, the minister of finance, 
was to be deprived of his office in favour of a 
fanatical adherent of the Regent's policy, the 
Marquis d'Argenson. 

At Sceaux warnings began to pour in from all 
sides ; it was evident that the Due d'Orleans had 
vowed to bring about the complete humiliation 
of the House of Maine, and alleging the fact that 
the court of Sceaux entertained treacherous rela- 
tions with Spain, he proposed to deprive the Due 
du Maine of his last office at Court, the direction 
of the King's education. This was a bold move in 
the game of a man accused of having poisoned 
both the father and the mother of the child over 
whom he now claimed complete control — and at a 
time when suspicion still rankled in many minds and 
ostentatiously expressed itself in the most insulting 
precautionary measures. The old Marechal de 
Villeroi, for instance, the King's governor, kept the 



WARNINGS 131 

bread and the linen under lock and key, and affected 
special precautions in reference to the King's wine, 
at which action, as Duclos says in his Memoirs, 
" fools marvelled, and ill - intentioned people 
applauded ! " 

Notwithstanding all this, the Regent dared to 
propose to the Council for the Regency the change 
which he was contemplating, and one voice only was 
raised in protest. The Due and the Duchesse du 
Maine were warned of the blow which threatened 
them, and lived for some time in dreaded anticipa- 
tion of it ; as the days passed, however, and brought 
no catastrophe, Madame du Maine's elastic nature 
rebounded into optimism, and on the eve of the 
26th August, in honour of Saint Louis, her patron 
saint, she gave a brilliant reception at the Arsenal. 
The very next morning was to witness the crash. 

The Duchesse was sleeping peacefully, after 
the gaieties of the night, when a messenger 
arrived post-haste from the Due, who had returned 
to the Tuileries a few hours before. Even while 
she hastily prepared to obey the imperative 
message which called her back. Parliament was 
being summoned to the Tuileries, where the 
King was to hold a lit de justice. The news 
had burst upon the Due in the early morning, 
when one of the gentlemen of his household had 
waked him with the intimation that something 
unusual was taking place in the palace ; a sound of 
hammering was distinctly audible above the Due's 



132 HUMILIATION OF THE MAINES 

apartment, and the explanation of this untimely 
disturbance — it was then five o'clock in the 
morning — was not long forthcoming : a small 
army of workmen were getting ready the Throne 
Room. 

Monsieur du Maine dressed with feverish haste 
and went up to the King's apartment, where the 
Regent soon joined him, and said to him with 
triumphant malice : "I know that since the 
last edict passed by Parliament, you have not 
cared for public assemblies ; the King is to hold 
a lit de justice to-day, your absence will be 
excused." " I shall dispense with this ceremony 
all the more willingly, as the lit de justice will 
not concern us," replied the Due du Maine. 
" Perhaps," retorted the Regent, and left him 
to ponder on that fateful word. 

The lit de justice was opened ; in helpless 
consternation and abject fear the Due du 
Maine wandered about the Tuileries, not daring 
to face the assembly which was despoiling him 
of his last honours. It was in this piteous 
state that the Duchesse found him and strove 
in vain to terrorise him into action ; even then 
the wrath of his dreaded tyrant could not make 
him cross the threshold of the salle du trone. 
In the stress of her anxiety to know something, 
at least, of that which the " contemptible coward," 
who was the head of the House of Maine, 
refused to hear, the Duchesse bade some pages 



THE LIT DE JUSTICE 133 

climb up the balconies and spy through the 
windows of the assembly hall. Clutching at 
whatever support was available, and straining 
their eyes and ears, they were able to catch 
some scraps at least of the momentous events 
which were taking place, and threw them to 
their masters below. It was in this ignominious 
manner that the Due and the Duchesse du Maine 
first learned the decrees of the 29th August 1718. 

Never, perhaps, did a king of France hold a 
more dramatic lit de justice than did the little boy 
king of eight, around whose childish unconscious- 
ness passions surged so high on that memorable 
day. "The expression and the countenance of 
those who were present," says the Due de Saint- 
Simon in his Memoirs, " beggar description." 

At last the momentous question of the 
relative rights of the legitimes and the legitimes 
was to be finally decided, and the former, on 
whose side were ranged the dukes and peers, 
knew that their hour of triumph had come. 
Many of those present could hardly refrain 
from giving vent to their feelings of exultation. 

" It was well known," says Saint-Simon, " with 
what ardour I had defended the cause of the 
Peers against the privileges of the legitimes, 
I therefore imparted to my countenance an 
additional expression of gravity and modesty, 
and, slowly getting my eyes under proper 

I 2 



134 HUMILIATION OF THE MAINES 

control, I resolved to look no one in the 
face. As soon as the Regent had opened his 
lips, Monsieur le Due had darted at me a 
triumphant glance which had all but destroyed 
my impassibility ; it was a warning to me to 
exaggerate the sobriety of my expression, and 
to avoid all possibility that our eyes should 
meet. Thus I remained self-contained, motion- 
less, as if glued to my seat, yet watching with 
a devouring interest everybody's expression, and 
in a state of the utmost tension ; my whole 
being was permeated with the most vivid yet 
delicate sensations of joy, with the most entrancing 
emotion, with a happiness for which I had longed 
with boundless yearning. I was sweating with 
anguish at my efforts to repress the transports 
of my delight, and with that very anguish mingled 
a sense of voluptuous enjoyment, such as I never 
felt either before or after that great day. How 
truly inferior to the pleasures of the mind are 
the mere pleasures of the senses ! " 

In an atmosphere thus fraught with passion 
the decree w^hich deprived Monsieur du Maine 
of his last honours was moved without en- 
countering any resistance ; a feeble protest 
raised by Parliament was swept away, and the 
Due du Maine's last office at Court was given 
over to the rival who had been most violent in 
his persecutions of him, to Monsieur le Due, 
nephew of Madame du Maine. 

Intimation was, moreover, given to the chief 



DEPRIVED 135 

victim of the day, that his apartments in the 
Tuileries should be vacated within a few hours. 
On the evening of that same 27th of August 
Monsieur le Due took possession of his new 
quarters, while his vanquished rivals had to seek 
refuge in the Hotel de Toulouse, the property 
of Monsieur du Maine's younger brother, the 
Comte de Toulouse. 

If anything could add to the bitterness of 
this sudden blow, it was the invidious distinction 
which had on that day been made between the 
two brothers. The indictment against the Due 
du Maine had hardly been pronounced, when 
the Regent had risen and declared before the 
Assembly that he had "thought it fit to give 
back, as a favour, that which he had been 
obliged to take away for the sake of equity, 
and to make a personal exception in favour of 
Monsieur le Comte de Toulouse, an exception 
which would leave him, and him alone, in the 
possession of all the honours that he had hitherto 
enjoyed." The Regent added that this favour was 
granted to the Comte de Toulouse in recognition 
of "his virtue, his application, his probity, and 
his disinterestedness." 

However luminous the younger brother's 
virtues may have been, they could hardly have 
shed any ray of comfort upon the gloom of that 
terrible night, which the fugitives spent under 



1S6 HUMILIATION OF THE MAINES 

his roof. "The horror of this flight," says 
Mademoiselle Delaunay, "and still more the 
event which was the cause of it, made an 
impression upon me, such as I have never 
experienced on any other occasion. Madame la 
Duchesse du Maine had sent me to Sceaux to 
look through all her papers and to burn all that 
could seem reprehensible. I returned in the 
evening to the Hotel de Toulouse, and spent 
the entire night by the bedside of Madame la 
Duchesse, whose condition was past description. 
She was in a state of prostration, which was like 
an entire absence of life, like a lethargic sleep, 
from which she only roused herself now and 
again with sudden, convulsive movements." 

A plan of action was imperative, nevertheless, 
and the next day the Due and the Duchesse, 
with their suite, returned to Sceaux. There the 
same shroud of passive gloom hung heavily over 
all for several days, only lifted here and there by 
the stirring of some fear or anxiety among the 
members of the conspiracy. So many dangers 
threatened ! The letters which the Baron de 
Walef was sending from Spain might be inter- 
cepted at any time, the imprudence of Monsieur 
de Pompadour and others had to be reckoned 
with. The most uneasy of all was certainly 
Monsieur de Malezieu ; he now spent more hours 
and efforts than ever in the quest of the rough 



THE DUCHESSE PROSTRATE 137 

copy of that letter which he had mislaid, oscillating 
between the certainty that it must be found and 
the conviction that it had been stolen and 
delivered into the hands of the Regent. 

Two months passed without any further com- 
plications, and the conspirators began to breathe 
freely again ; that Madame du Maine's crushed 
spirits were recovering from the shock which they 
had sustained, was amply proved by the fact 
that she now returned to her political intrigues. 
A certain caution still characterised her actions : 
she dared not hold personal intercourse with 
her allies in Paris, but she could not resist the 
wish to again dip her fingers into the troubled 
waters of intrigue ; she did many foolish things, 
one of which was to send Mademoiselle Delaunay 
to Paris to hold a secret confabulation with the 
Comte de Laval. The messenger had little faith 
in the efficiency of this ill-advised measure, but, as 
usual, she refrained from expressing her opinion, 
and submitted to a three hours' tete-a-tete with 
the Count. She emerged from it in a state of 
utter mental exhaustion ; in the general incoherence 
of the conversation one point only, it seems, had 
appealed to them both with equal force, namely 
the advisability of never pronouncing each other's 
names! . . . 

As Mademoiselle Delaunay was returning to 
Sceaux, in the dead of the night, according to 



138 HUMILIATION OF THE MAINES 

strict injunctions, her carriage was overturned 
and she was hurled into a ditch. " At the time 
when people believed in omens," she remarks, 
"this one would not have been despised." 

In truth, a destructive fate was rapidly descend- 
ing upon Sceaux, called down by Madame du 
Maine's very efforts to ward it off. She brought 
about the final catastrophe in less than two months. 
Once roused from her torpor she felt with a 
goading keenness that the more insults she had 
to avenge, the more she needed the help of 
Spain. There was nothing to be done at Sceaux, 
a solitude more or less shunned by all, and under 
the pretext that she wanted to chose a new 
town residence, Madame du Maine returned to 
Paris. 

Her allies were able to prove to her that they 
had not wasted their time, even while deprived of 
her inspiring presence. Monsieur de Pompadour 
had been specially hard at work, a towering 
pile of writings, manifestoes, letters, declarations, 
formed an imposing monument, in front of which 
Madame de Pompadour would stand and sigh 
despondently : " We have the most decisive and the 
most useful documents ; but nothing can be got 
through to the Court of Spain ! " The opportunity 
at last presented itself. The Abbe Portocarrero, 
a young Spaniard known to Madame du Maine, 
was returning to his country in a travelling 



RETURN TO PARIS 139 

coach which possessed the inestimable advantage 
of a secret box under the seat. The Abbe was 
ready to vouch, with the most solemn oaths, for 
the inviolability of his coach, and although his 
feeling of security was not shared by all, the 
occasion seemed too good to be wasted ; after 
some hesitation the precious papers were piled 
into the secret box, and the Abbe started for 
Spain. 

Meanwhile one of these small causes which 
produce great effects was taking its momentous 
share in the development of the drama. There 
was on the evening of Portocarrero's departure a 
disappointed woman in the establishment of La 
Fillon in Paris ; a rendezvous which had been 
arranged was countermanded. There was nothing 
very unusual about an occurrence of that kind, 
but the excuse which explained it raised it to 
the importance of an affair of State. " I cannot 
come," had written one of the secretaries of the 
Spanish Embassy, to the woman who expected 
him, "on account of the enormous number of 
despatches necessitated by the Abbe Portocarrero's 
departure for Spain." 

The woman thought it advisable to put this 
excuse before La Fillon, and the latter, perhaps 
one of the numerous spies employed by the 
Government, sent the Regent an intimation of 
what had happened. 



140 HUMILIATION OF THE MAINES 

Now Fortune was pleased in this case, as in 
many others, to follow her caprices and to favour 
first one side of the game and then the other. It 
is true that Portocarrero was pursued at once, 
stopped at Poitiers, and deprived of all his papers 
in spite of the wonderful structure of his coach ; 
but once despoiled of his despatches he was 
released, and the papers which were brought 
back to the Regent, were stopped by an insur- 
mountable barrier, just before reaching their final 
destination. 

They were stopped at the door of the Regent's 
private apartments. It was late, and the Due 
d'Orleans had just sat down to one of his notorious 
midnight revels with his roues, as he called 
his friends in debauchery, and a few women of 
" middling virtue," as Saint-Simon characterises 
them. The sumptuous table with its shimmering 
gold plate was awaiting the Lucullan repast ; 
the jovial company was perhaps lending a hand 
to the professional cooks, as was its custom, 
or the witty assembly was holding its usual 
review of the scandals and the comedies of the 
Court. 

Perhaps the Regent's favourite mistress, 
Madame de Sabran, " slightly debauched, but 
not wicked," had just declared, looking at her 
lover in one of her defiant moods, that " God 
has made princes and lackeys of the same clay, 



A LUCULLAN REPAST 141 

carefully separating it from that out of which 
other men were made." Whatever may have been 
happening behind the closed doors, the orders 
were strict, and no one dared go against them. 

" From the time of the supper hour," says 
Saint - Simon, " everything was so strongly 
barricaded that it was useless to try to gain 
access to the Regent — even about affairs of the 
most vital interest to the State or to himself." 

On being released, Portocarrero had at once 
despatched a secret messenger with a warning to 
the Spanish Embassy, and on that occasion the 
Regent's dilatory methods of treating business 
gave the Spanish ambassador a margin of sixteen 
hours in which to act. Trusting to luck and 
to the Regent's temperament, he believed he 
could safely send into Spain the most compro- 
mising papers which remained still in his charge. 
He sent them to a certain Abbe Brigaut, with 
a hundred louis, and the order to start out at 
once. The Abbe, by no means a heroical con- 
spirator, took the hundred louis and the papers 
but only kept the money; he left the papers in 
Paris, in the charge of a friend, the Chevalier de 
Menil, telling him that they were some old family 
deeds. Then, with a Hghter heart, he started 
on his way. 

Of all these events, nothing transpired until 
the following day. In the afternoon of that 9th 



142 HUMILIATION OF THE MAINES 

day of December 1718, one of the Due du Maine's 
gentlemen - in - waiting rushed into Mademoiselle 
Delaunay's apartment with the startUng news that 
the Spanish Embassy was under military occupa- 
tion and the whole neighbourhood under police 
supervision ; but that the reason of it was not yet 
known. It was but too well known to most of the 
inmates of Sceaux, upon whom real torture was 
inflicted by the comments and suppositions of 
uninitiated friends who appeared one after the 
other, full of the same subject. Madame du 
Maine dared not try to escape from her impor- 
tunate callers, she bravely masked her anxiety 
under a feigned indifference, and only stole a 
few seconds from her social duties to hold a 
hurried interview with Mademoiselle Delaunay, 
and beg her to ascertain the real state of 
affairs. 

The details of the total failure of the plot 
reached Sceaux by degrees ; first the news of the 
confiscation of Portocarrero's papers, then the 
intimation that important documents had been 
seized at the Embassy, and at last the announce- 
ment of the arrest of Prince Cellamare and of the 
imprisonment of the Marquis de Pompadour and 
the Marquis de Saint Genies. One hope only 
remained : the Abbe Brigaut was believed to be 
well beyond reach, with his weighty documents. 
Mademoiselle Delaunay's Memoirs tell how this 



UNCERTAINTY AT SCEAUX 143 

last hope was shattered, two days after the first 
news had been received. 

" Madame la Duchesse du Maine was playing a 
game of biribi, according to her custom (she was 
careful not to make any change in her usual 
round of occupations) when a certain Monsieur de 
Chatillon, a very morose man, who hardly ever 
spoke at all, said suddenly : ' By the way, here is 
a funny piece of news : in connection with that 
affair at the Spanish embassy, they >have just 
arrested and sent to the Bastille a certain abbe 

Bri Bri ' He could not recall the name 

and none of those who knew it had any wish to 
help him. At last he found the name and added : 
' The ridiculous part of the business is that he has 
confessed everything, and there must be now a 
good many people in a nice state of embarrassment ! ' 
Then he burst out laughing, a thing he had never 
been known to do before. Madame la Duchesse 
du Maine, though she felt not the least inclination 
to join in his merriment, said : ' Yes, that is indeed 
very funny.' ' It is enough to make one die of 
laughter,' rejoined Monsieur de Chatillon. Just 
think of these people who believed their trans- 
action to be absolutely safe, and here comes a 
fellow who tells even more than he is asked, and 
gives the names of all those connected with the 
affair!" 

It was soon known that the Abbe Brigaut had 
effected a real chef-doeuvre of blunders ; he had 
disguised himself as a gallant soldier of fortune. 



144 HUMILIATION OF THE MAINES 

but he had omitted to remove from his pockets 
some tell - tale letters addressed to " the Abbe 
Brigaut," and he had hired a broken down old 
steed which hopelessly belied his character of a 
dashing cavalier ! The ill-assorted pair had ambled 
along so successfully that they had covered several 
miles in three days, at the end of which they 
had been stopped in their triumphant progress 
by an agent of the Regent, who arrested them 
at Montargis, a very short distance from Paris. 
Luckily by the time the Abbe was overtaken, the 
papers he had left in Paris had been destroyed 
by his prudent friend. 

At the news of the arrest of the Spanish 
Ambassador, the Chevalier du Menil, who was 
very suspicious of the documents confided to him, 
took it upon himself to violate the secrecy of 
the Abbe's "family papers." He found, as he 
had expected, that very few of the documents 
answered to that description, whereupon he did 
not hesitate to burn the rest. The conflagration 
thus produced had hardly subsided, when the 
Chevalier du Menil was ordered to appear before 
Cardinal Dubois, the Regent's minister ; cross- 
examined as to his relations with the Abbe 
Brigaut, Monsieur du Menil answered, in strict 
accordance with the truth, that the Abbe had never 
spoken to him of this fatal business ; never losing 
his presence of mind, he appeared at last to be 







■i j;^*^ V _-^ V c U.J.- 



GUILLAUME, CARDINAL DUBOIS. 



Jo face p. 144. 



FAMILY PAPERS RANSACKED 145 

yielding to the force of much persuasion, and made 
an " ingenuous confession " to the effect that he 
did have at his house some papers entrusted to 
him by the Abb^. The papers were fetched and 
the Hght of innocence seemed to shine more and 
more over the incident when the carefully- con- 
structed plan was ruined by the Abbd himself. On 
being told that his papers were in the hands of the 
Regent, he exclaimed : " Then all details must be 
known, question me no more, for every point of 
the business was stated in those papers ! " Two 
days later Monsieur du Menil was in the Bastille. 
Each morning brought tidings of a new arrest, 
and Monsieur and Madame du Maine lived in 
hourly expectation of a royal warrant against their 
persons. The measures which the Regent was 
taking to justify his treatment of the affair pointed 
to an even more rigorous intervention of the law, 
in case of future inculpations. Copies of two 
letters written by Cellamare to the Spanish 
minister, Cardinal Alberoni, were put into public 
circulation, and were headed by the following 
declaration from the Regent : — 

" In order that the public may be informed 
upon what foundation is based the resolution taken 
by his Majesty the King on the 9th instant, namely, 
the dismissal of Prince Cellamare, ambassador of 
the Court of Spain, and the decree that he should 
be accompanied as far as the Spanish frontier by 

K 



146 HUMILIATION OF THE MAINES 

one of the gentlemen of his suite, we have com- 
manded to be printed a copy of two letters of 
the said ambassador to his Eminence, Cardinal 
Alberoni, written on the first and on the second 
day of this month, signed by the said ambassador 
and written throughout in his own hand, without 
the use of any cipher." 

An ominous note of warning ran all through 
the paragraph which followed the text of the two 
letters : — 

" When the service of the King and the necessary 
precautions to be taken for the safety of the 
State will permit the pubhcation of the plans, 
manifestos, and memoirs quoted in these two 
letters, then will be brought to light all the circum- 
stances of the detestable conspiracy set afoot by 
the said ambassador for the purpose of causing a 
revolution in the kingdom." 

From this declaration it was clear that the 
diverse ramifications of the plot known in history 
as " Cellamare's conspiracy " would be considered 
entirely homogeneous with their root, namely, 
the plan to foster the general discontent then 
prevalent in France, for the purpose of over- 
throwing the Regent and strengthening the Spanish 
influence. Viewed in this light, the dealings of all 
those implicated would bear the character of high 
treason and be dealt with accordingly. 

For a time it seemed as if Madame du Maine 



CELLAMARE'S CONSPIRACY 147 

would prove herself a true grand - daughter of 
the Grand Conde. Her spirit rose with the 
approach of danger, and her dauntlessness inspired 
all those around her. In reality it was her innate 
sense of the dramatic which was revelling in the 
proportions of the approaching tragedy. Never 
had her most ambitious productions on the stage 
of Sceaux afforded her a leading part of such 
magnitude ! This portentous time of waiting was 
truly one of those psychological crises worthy 
of the choice of a Corneille, or a Racine, and there 
came a night which the Duchesse deemed just the 
one to figure as the culminating point, as a kind 
of third act in a classical tragedy ! 

In the evening a secret warning had been sent 
by the Marquise de Lambert that the arrest was 
imminent. Madame du Maine assembled around 
her all those whom she considered worthy to 
figure in the great scene ; the younger Monsieur 
de Malezieu was there, endeavouring to find the 
noble answer to the high-minded tirade of the 
heroine ; the Chevalier de Gavaudun was there 
with his polished repartees ; and Mademoiselle 
Delaunay, in her usual role of the classical 
confident^ listened politely to each one in turn. 
A few others were there besides, but Monsieur 
le Due du Maine was not amongst them. He 
had acknowledged his inability to hold his own 
in this dramatic performance, and had retired to 



148 HUMILIATION OF THE MAINES 

Sceaux, where he was awaiting his fate more or 
less ingloriously. As a climax, the night was a 
failure, for it wore on and the day broke and 
nothing happened. At last the weary actors 
retired one by one, and no one remained with 
the exhausted heroine, who had thrown herself 
on her bed, except her faithful confidente^ 
Mademoiselle Delaunay, who now turned to that 
part of her role which was most familiar to her, 
and took up a book in order to put her mistress 
to sleep. The book happened to be Machiavelli's 
" Decades," marked at the chapter called *' Con- 
spiracies." She showed it to the iDuchesse who 
exclaimed with a burst of laughter : " For heaven's 
sake put away this evidence against us as fast as 
you can, it would be of the most damning nature." 
Four or five days went by without bringing 
any change ; Madame du Maine, having a great 
deal of leisure, and being unable to devote it to 
anything but the great care of the moment, had 
undertaken to write a defence of her acts, which 
she meant to entrust to her mother, Madame la 
Princesse, and in which she put great confidence. 
Before she could finish this piece of eloquence, 
however, she was arrested. 

" Madame la Duchesse having spent the greater 
part of the night writing her apology and talking 
to me about it, went to sleep about six o'clock 
and I retired. I was just beginning to doze, when 



THE DUCHESSES APOLOGIA 149 

I heard my door, which was kept on the latch, 
suddenly open. I thought that Madame la 
Duchesse was sending for me, and I said half 
in a dream : ' Who is it ? ' An unknown voice 
answered : 'In the service of the King.' Then 
1 understood the position. I was bidden in a 
rather uncivil manner to get up at once. I 
obeyed without speaking. It was on the 29th 
of December and still very dark. The people 
who had entered my room had come without a 
light ; they went to fetch one, and I could then 
distinguish an officer of the Guards and two 
musketeers. The officer read out to me an order 
which enjoined him to keep a close watch upon 
me. 

" Meanwhile I proceeded to dress and asked 
for my maid, whose room was some little distance 
from mine, but they would not allow her to 
come. The whole house was filled with guards 
and musketeers, and no one could move about any- 
where ; she tried several times to force a passage 
through the soldiers, but was always driven back. 
I was in a state of horrible anxiety as to what 
was happening in Madame la Duchesse du Maine's 
apartments, for I did not doubt that she was 
being arrested at the same time, and surmised 
rightly that they would not let me know any- 
thing about it. I learned later on that the Due 
de Bethune, captain of the guards, accompanied 
by Monsieur de la Billarderie, lieutenant of the 
King's body guard, had brought her the King's 
order for her imprisonment, to which she had 
submitted without any resistance. La Billarderie 

K 2 



150 HUMILIATION OF THE MAINES 

asked the woman who was sleeping in Madame 
la Duchesse du Maine's room whether she was 
not the Demoiselle Delaunay. She denied it with 
great determination, feeling no desire, for the time 
being, to undergo the treatment destined to me. 

" I remained alone with my three guards from 
seven until eleven o'clock that morning, without 
knowing anything of what was going on outside 
my room ; I asked one of them with whom I 
affected to converse light-heartedly if I should 
not accompany Madame du Maine in the event 
of her being moved to some other residence. He 
assured me that she would not be denied any- 
thing that she might wish to request. This hope 
was gratifying, but I did not enjoy it long; 
another guard came in soon to announce that 
the Duchesse had gone, and that now I could be 
left with one musketeer. ..." 

If the Regent's police agents had demurred 
for a time, they were all the more active on 
that 29th day of December 1718. The younger 
Monsieur de Malezieu, the Chevalier de Gavaudun, 
Mademoiselle de Montauban were arrested with 
Madame du Maine at her Paris residence, and 
also two footmen, four grooms, and two chamber- 
maids. 

The same fate was at the same time overtaking 
the Due du Maine and the elder Monsieur de 
Malezieu at Sceaux. While the papers were 
being examined and sifted in their presence, the 



POLICE ACTIVITY 151 

King's officer suddenly came upon the long lost 
copy of the letter which had so far eluded all 
researches. Monsieur de Malezieu was the first 
to spy it, as it lay hidden between the folds of 
his son's marriage contract, and with a violence 
born of a long-standing grudge, he pounced upon 
the refractory document and tore it to pieces. 
The officer seems to have been prepared for such 
emergencies ; without a word of remonstrance he 
picked up the fragments, and later on they were 
pieced together into a very conclusive evidence. 
As the weary day of the arrest wore on, 
Madame du Maine's stoicism forsook her. She 
had never imagined for one instant that the 
Regent could forget the honours due to her 
rank and her person; her gloomiest visions of 
imprisonment had shown her nothing worse than 
some distant royal residence and a momentary 
seclusion in the company of a suitable household. 
When she learned that she was being taken to 
the fortress of Dijon, her indignation knew no 
bounds, and the thought that her prison was in 
Burgundy, the province governed by Monsieur 
le Due, her arch-enemy, threw her into a frenzy 
of despair. If we are to believe the rather 
spiteful pen of Madame, the Regent's mother, 
" she nearly choked with rage," and fell tooth 
and nail upon her escort, among others upon 
poor La Billarderie, a man who suffered from 



152 HUMILIATION OF THE MAINES 

deplorable tender-heartedness, and who was deeply 
affected by the harrowing sight of a great princess' 
misfortunes. 

Mademoiselle Delaunay was left in her room, 
all day in company with her musketeer, whilst the 
house was being searched for further evidence. 

The police was disappointed, nothing was 
found over which Madame du Maine's enemies 
could have rejoiced except, according to Madame, 
the Regent's mother, some letters from the 
Cardinal de Polignac, which were evidently not 
meant for publication. The answers to these 
were seized among the Cardinal's papers, and 
Madame triumphantly quotes a passage from 
one w^hich, she says, makes her "burst into 
peals of laughter, in spite of her sadness ! " 

About seven o'clock at night the police had 
completed its business at Madame du Maine's 
house, and Mademoiselle Delaunay was invited 
to get into a coach, guarded by three musketeers. 

"I had an idea," she says, "that the drive 
would not be a long one, and that I was being 
taken to the Bastille : in fact I soon arrived there. 
They made me alight at the end of a small bridge, 
where I was met by the Governor. After having 
entered the prison, I was kept for a while behind 
the door, because of the arrival of some of our party, 
whom I was not allowed to see. I understood 
nothing of all these ceremonies ! When the 



ARRIVAL AT THE BASTILLE 153 

prisoners in question had been safely put into their 
respective niches, the Governor came to fetch me 
and led me to mine. I had to cross more bridges, 
when one could hear a clanking of chains w^hich 
produced anything but an agreeable harmony, and 
at last I arrived in a big room with four dirty 
bare walls, all scribbled over by my predecessors, 
It was so utterly devoid of furniture, that some 
one had to go and fetch me a stool to sit on, two 
stones were brought in to support a lighted fagot, 
and a small end of a candle was fastened neatly 
into the wall to give me some light. All these 
luxuries having been provided for me, the 
Governor retired, and I heard the grating of five 
or six heavy keys, and of quite double that amount 
of bolts." 



CHAPTEH XII 

THE FIRST YEARS OF THE REGENCY 

The licence and disorder which characterised the 
first years after Louis XIV.'s death were a direct 
challenge to conspirators. The Regent, who had 
won his power by an act of intimidation, only 
kept it by virtue of the disunion existing among 
rival factions. It was therefore his interest to 
foment dissensions and to let conspiracies thrive 
for a time. They thrived apace, each based more 
or less on the probable death of the little 
King. Philip V. of Spain, in spite of renuncia- 
tion acts, was ready to forsake his kingdom 
at any time, in order to seize the crown of 
France ; he would also willingly have snatched 
at the slightest chance to wrest the Regency 
from the Due d'Orleans, and had already made 
all necessary plans for establishing a vicarious 
government in Spain during his absence. The 
Condes, hereditary rivals of the House of Orleans, 
upheld this plan secretly. 

The Due du Maine went on dreaming his 
154 



POMP AND DISPLAY 155 

ambitious dreams, and devoted a considerable 
amount of his colossal fortune to the buying of 
influential members in Parliament. If the choice 
had to lie between Philip V. and the Due 
d'Orl^ans, he would, of course, uphold the former, 
but he would have preferred to use Spain for his 
own ends, and he was scheming accordingly. 
England, who, since the death of the Austrian 
emperor in 1711, had feared Austrian pretensions 
to the throne of Spain far more than French 
usurpations, was seeking an alliance with the 
Regent. Lord Stair, British ambassador to the 
Court of France, was endeavouring to persuade 
the Due d'Orleans that in the event of his 
ascending the throne, his position would be very 
similar to that of George I., usurper of the Stuart 
rights, and on that basis he advised an alliance. 

The Regent's natural nonchalance prevented 
him from deciding upon any definite course. He 
had "all the gifts except that of making use of 
them," as his shrewd mother had once said of 
him, and now he was letting things go, and 
allowing the direction of affairs to slip more and 
more into the hands of a low intriguer who had 
the soul of a flunkey and the manners of a bully. 
The Abbe Dubois, former tutor of the Due 
d'Orleans and his future prime minister, was 
beginning to cast his sinister shadow over the affairs 
of France. His tyranny, however, was not felt 



156 THE FIRST YEARS OF THE REGENCY 

yet; neither was the Regent's authority, and 
Duclos aptly expresses the situation when he 
says that "all felt that they could regulate their 
rights according to their pretensions." Not the 
least among these was the Duchesse de Berry, 
the Regent's daughter, a reckless, impetuous 
creature whom he idolised. She had trembled 
before the King — " elle avait rampe devant 
Mademoiselle de Maintenon," as some Memoirs 
of the time express it — but now she had her 
revenge, and broke loose from all restraint. 

The extravagance of her caprices kept Paris 
in a perpetual state of surprise and indignation. 
Now she demanded a special bodyguard, and, 
accompanied by it, she paraded the streets of 
Paris heralded by the sound of trumpets ; now 
she had a royal canopy erected over her seat at 
the Opera, or at the Theatre Francais she placed 
four members of her bodyguard upon the stage, 
and four in the parterre. 

At the hue and cry raised by each of these 
experiments in royal display, the Regent's authority 
had to intervene and forbid, but his was only a half- 
hearted repression. He had a passionate admira- 
tion for his daughter's daring and inexhaustible 
vitality ; she was the only woman who could keep 
abreast of him in his breathless race for pleasures, 
and he associated her more and more with his 
revels. So notorious were these that even to the 



A TURNING POINT 157 

Court of those days, the situation seemed inde- 
fensible, and ugly whispers, suggesting the 
worst, began to be heard. The Regent did not 
hear them, however, or if he did, he did not 
heed. 

A new fever had seized Paris ; the country had 
stood at the edge of an abyss — national bankruptcy, 
but had been saved as by a miracle. Law had 
arrived upon the scene with his "system"; his 
scheme of salvation had been adopted, and Law's 
system of paper money was now in full swing. 
The gambling fever was upon all ; it was spread- 
ing like a devastating fire, and within its grasp 
measures of prudence were as blades of grass in 
the whirl of a tempest. Fortunes were made 
and lost in one day. Even then, though but 
few suspected it, one third at least of the paper 
money in circulation was utterly worthless, yet 
the issue of notes continued, and no one who 
was responsible for this cared or dared to think 
of the crash which must inevitably follow. 

The Regent cared least of all ; for years past he 
had squandered his strength with reckless dissipa- 
tion, now his excesses were beginning to tell at 
last; his vitality was drained to its lowest ebb. 
After one of his nightly revels, he would often sink 
into a torpor which hung like a dense fog between 
him and necessary resolutions. He would then 
yield without any volition of his own to any 



158 THE FIRST YEARS OF THE REGENCY 

pressure put upon him. He granted favours to 
friends and enemies alike, so that his bounties 
soon sank as low in value as any of Law's paper 
money ; and in the presence of such weakness, 
people began to regret the violation of the late 
King's will. 

It was a favourable time for an attempt at 
overthrowing the Government ; the Due and 
Duchesse du Maine had chosen their hour well, 
and but for the fact that Madame du Maine « 
was decidedly not a politician, the whole fate of 
France might have been turned in that very 
year 1718. 



CHAPTER XIII 

AT THE BASTILLE 

Mademoiselle Delaunay's imprisonment was to 

last eighteen months, and it was merciful that the 

luxury of knowing that beforehand could not be 

added to those other " comforts " which marked 

her first hour in the Bastille. In spite of a state 

of despondency which was natural enough, she 

soon discovered that solitude has some inherent 

advantages. " I found more liberty than I had 

left behind me," she says. " It is true that 

in a prison one cannot please oneself, but on 

the other hand one need not please any one 

else." On the whole her lot was very bearable, 

and hardly in keeping with the traditional ideas 

about the horrors of the Bastille. She had crossed 

its threshold with the natural fears inspired by 

the gruesome tales she had heard about it ; with 

a sickening terror she had listened for hours to 

an awful grinding sound which rose from some 

unknown regions just below her room, and which 

she attributed to the working of some instrument 

of torture. She was steeling herself to encounter 

159 



160 AT THE BASTILLE 

this nerve-racking horror, when, through a chance 
remark of her gaoler, she discovered that it was 
nothing more formidable than the turning of 
the spit in the kitchen below. 

Quite tolerable meals were sent up from 
that homely quarter of the prison ; they were 
served in a room which now seemed palatial, 
after the addition of a bed, an armchair, two 
chairs, a table, and a jug and basin. Mademoiselle 
Delaunay was not alone, she had been allowed 
to take her maid, the " faithful Rondel," with her. 
They played cards together, or while the mistress 
feasted on some odd volumes of " Cleopatre," the 
only literature provided for her, the maid amused 
herself by holding a washing day in the hand 
basin. Nor were these their only pastimes ; the 
two women obtained from the authorities the per- 
mission to keep a cat, to frighten away the mice 
and rats, and after having been obliged much 
against their will to witness the antics of the 
mice, they could one day amuse themselves with 
looking on at the gambols of a family of kittens ! 

After a while Mademoiselle Delaunay was 
allowed the use of paper and ink ; the sheets of 
paper were carefully counted, and, as they had 
to be handed back to the Governor, the choice 
of subjects she could treat was limited ; but 
that did not discourage the author, and she 
edified herself and the Governor with "Moral 




PHILIPPE, DUG D'ORLEANS, 
Regent : 1715-1723 



To face p. 160. 



FRIENDS IN NEED 161 

Considerations on the Book of Ecclesiastes ! " 
Her friends outside had shown that they did 
not forget her, and this may have helped her 
to dwell with equanimity on the discouraging 
pessimism of King Solomon. A few weeks after 
her incarceration the Governor entered her room, 
holding in his hand a purse full of gold, and 
followed by a man who was carrying a bulky 
bundle. The bundle contained the prisoner's 
clothes sent by Monsieur de Valincourt ; the purse 
was one which she had once worked for that 
faithful friend and which he was now returning 
well filled. The generous giver did not stop at 
that ; he obtained from the Ministers the per- 
mission to send in every week, a large open 
sheet, one side of which was filled with enquiries 
as to all possible wants of the prisoner ; on the 
opposite side, the Governor wrote down the " yes " 
or " no " which Mademoiselle Delaunay answered 
in his presence to each point of interrogation. 

For some time neither mistress nor maid could 
discover which of the Sceaux conspirators had been 
brought to the Bastille after them, although Rondel, 
the only one of the two who possessed " a pair of 
eyes useful for distances," was very vigilant at her 
post of observation, a tiny grated window high up 
in the wall and looking over the entrance court. 
From there she gave her mistress a detailed 
report of all newcomers. At last one day 



162 AT THE BASTILLE 

Mademoiselle Delaunay recognised from her maid's 
description the strange couple with whom she had 
been " bidden to still stranger feasts." The Abbe 
Lecamus and his famished countess had had the 
honour of being arrested for their " political 
offences," and were no doubt reckoning with a 
fair degree of satisfaction the number of days 
during which they might hope to satisfy their 
hunger at the expense of the Government. 

The Marquis de Pompadour was seen to arrive 
soon after, with the escort due to his rank, and 
was safely put behind lock and key ; but there was 
no sign yet of the Comte de Laval. At last, 
Rondel exclaimed one morning : " Here is the man 
with the muzzle." The prisoners' list of the " Spanish 
conspirators " was now complete, and contained even 
some " supernumeraries " ; men who had had no 
direct connection either with Sceaux or Cellamare, 
but who were accused of private dealings with 
Spain. Among them was the Due de Richelieu, 
who was gaily adding to the number of his 
seances at the Bastille, the first of which, when 
he was barely eighteen, had won him much admira- 
tion from his contemporaries. There were others 
imprisoned, less gay than he, amongst them a 
certain Marquis de Bourdon, an old country squire, 
plunged in a state of stupor from which he seemed 
unable to emerge. A letter signed by him, full of 
the most ardent protestations of loyalty and of the 



CROSS-EXAMINATION 163 

most generous offers of help had been found among 
the Due du Maine's papers. He was arrested, 
brought to Paris, and cross-examined ; his judges 
enquired how he had conceived this strong attach- 
ment for the Due du Maine. " I do not know him," 
he replied ; " I have never seen him, or His Royal 
Highness either." "Why, then," proceeded the 
enquiry, " did you devote yourself entirely to the 
interests of this Prince, to the prejudice of those 
of the Regent." " Just as one takes sides for one 
player, rather than for another, without knowing 
why," was the reply, and no further explanation could 
ever be extracted from this unfortunate sportsman. 

The cross-examination of the prisoners had 
been entrusted to Messieurs d'Argenson and 
Leblanc. The famous Keeper of the Seals found 
it very difficult on this occasion to uphold his 
reputation for irresistible eloquence and infallible 
discrimination. Except for the Abbe Brigaut, who 
gave all the details asked of him and a great 
many more in addition, and who was disconcerting 
through his very loquacity, all the prisoners pre- 
served a dogged silence or succeeded in giving a 
most aggravating air of candour to their declara- 
tions of innocence. 

Many times the judges had to return to 
the Bastille, and, by means of Rondel's eyes. 
Mademoiselle Delaunay watched them as they 
crossed the entrance court. They were sometimes 



164. AT THE BASTILLE 

accompanied by the notorious Abbe Dubois, and 
then " one might have fancied indeed that one was 
looking at Minos, ^acus, and Rhadamanthus ! " 
she exclaims. The two women who had, after 
the manner of most prisoners, developed to its 
utmost the detective instinct which gives a mean- 
ing to the smallest trifle, always knew of the 
judges' arrival beforehand, by the smoke which 
filtered through the floor and which betrayed the 
fact that the fire was being lighted in the great 
hall, which served for the cross-examination. 
The Abbe Dubois, though all-powerful at Court, 
was not admitted into the judgment room ; his 
reputation for being "a madman who attacked 
everybody," his propensity for hurling people down 
stairs before they had had time to speak, made it 
probable that his presence w^ould be a hindrance 
in the path of justice. During the legal proceed- 
ings he was often seen pacing up and down the 
inner courts of the Bastille, his thin, pointed foxy 
face distorted by impotent rage at the lengthiness 
of the sittings, and his halting voice, hoarse from 
continual swearing, raised to the highest pitch of 
violent altercation, as he attacked the Governor 
of the Bastille on the subject of the prisoners' 
insubordination. 

Whenever a legal interview was taking place 
Mademoiselle Delaunay lay with her ear glued to 
the fl9or, straining every nerve to catch at the 



DIVERS WITNESSES 165 

meaning of what was going on below. She knew 
who was being cross-examined, as the prisoners 
could be seen walking across the court which led 
to the judgment room, and although no distinct 
words reached her, she could guess the character 
of the interview, as the voices rose or sank. 
Among all those who appeared before the judges, 
the best equipped for resistance, the best qualified 
by experience and lightheartedness, was the Due de 
Richelieu. After seeing all their best methods 
fail, d'Argenson and Leblanc tried to defeat him 
with his own arms, and confronted him with forged 
letters supposed to come from a princess who was 
not insensible to his passion. Even that was of 
no avail ; but love, which had not succeeded in 
causing him to make a political slip, was strong 
enough to procure him his liberty, after a com- 
paratively short time. The name of the person at 
whose bidding his prison door opened was whispered 
abroad, and it was not the name of the Regent. 

The Abbe Brigaut was a more satisfactory 
subject for examination ; every day he would find 
new reasons for unburdening his soul, and then 
justify this Christian duty to himself in edifying 
letters addressed to the relatives of those he had 
accused. The Marquis de Pompadour, on the other 
hand, preserved an unexpected silence, and he might 
perhaps have proved a hero after all had not his 

colleague, the Comte de Laval, been arrested at 

l2 



166 AT THE BASTILLE 

last. The judges, working on the probabiUties 
suggested by the close partnership of the two men, 
carried to one declarations supposed to have come 
from the other, and by this stratagem brought 
about the defection of the poor Marquis. It was 
then that he made what he called his " ingenuous " 
confession. He talked fast and long, and in his 
anxiety to omit nothing of what he knew, he 
mentioned among other things the fact that 
"Madame du Maine interrupted any political 
discussion as soon as the Due du Maine appeared." 
This detail did not seem to gratify the judges, w^ho 
called his attention to the fact that he had not been 
asked to write an apology of the Due du Maine ; 
in short, these equitable men begged him to retract 
his injudicious remark ! He complied with alacrity ; 
there was nothing forthwith that he could refuse to 
those in power over him, and so it was only just 
that he should be rewarded, in due time, with a 
sum of 40,000 livres, which he pocketed most 
readily. 

Monsieur de Laval stood firmly by his oath 
" not to mention any one's name," but, his friend 
having quoted all those which it was possible to 
quote, his steadfastness was a useless sacrifice. 
His spirit remained firm nevertheless ; and to 
keep the flesh from weakness he demanded that 
he should have medical attention at least twice 
a day. The chemist's bills for the Bastille 



SUCCESSFUL VERBAL FENCING 167 

lengthened considerably under his patronage, and 
the Regent, who entered into every detail which 
concerned the prisoners, was one day perusing 
these bills with the Abbe Dubois. The latter 
remonstrated at the frequency of some of the 
remedies administered, but the Due d'Orleans 
said, with a humorous smile : " Abbe, as these 
are the only pleasures they have, do not let us 
curtail them." 

Among the many checks experienced by 
Messieurs dArgenson and Leblanc, none were 
more aggravating than those which resulted from 
Mademoiselle Delaunay's method of answering. 
Agility was the very essence of her mind. She 
knew how to elude a question, while seeming to 
answer it in the most straightforward manner, 
and she was not burdened by the conscientious 
scruples of an Abbe Brigaut ; on the contrary, 
she was convinced that "the paths of deceit are 
always allowed to those who are deprived of the 
natural rights of society." She knew that it is 
always possible so to divide light and shade that 
those features become salient which one wishes to 
stand out, and it cost her no struggle to decide at 
the beginning of each interview that she would 
" only tell what she chose." Moreover, she was 
saved from any harrowing grief over the fate of 
the House of Maine by the conviction that 
"Princes always manage to get out of their 



168 AT THE BASTILLE 

difficulties." Three weeks elapsed before her first 
interrogatory took place. She had had plenty 
of time to prepare herself, and declares that she 
might have filled a volume with the answers 
thought out beforehand. None served her, it 
seems ; the simplicity of the first questions baffled 
her, and she says with one of her favourite 
authors: "J 'avals reponse a tout, hormis a qui 
va la I" 

A later interview with her judges afforded 
her more scope for the practice of her theories. 
On that occasion the aggravating serenity of 
the prisoner decoyed the lawyer into a quite 
unprofessional fit of temper. "You know the 
whole business," he exclaimed, " and we are 
determined that you shall speak, or else you will 
remain in the Bastille for life." " Sir," said 
Mademoiselle Delaunay, "this might certainly 
be a provision worth considering for a spinster 
like me." 

\ 



CHAPTER XIV 

LOVE AND TREACHERY WITHIN PRISON WALLS 

An indefinite stay in the Bastille would, in 
truth, not have seemed a deplorable fate to 
Mademoiselle Delaunay. Her material comforts 
had increased from month to month ; to keep 
up her health and her spirits there were walks 
in the courts and on the ramparts of the prison, 
there were cheerful dinners followed by sociable 
"coffee" in the Governor's apartments, or in the 
room of one or the other of the prisoners. News 
from the outside world began also by degrees 
to filter through the prison walls, and were all 
the more valued because of their scarcity ; they 
were collected carefully, "shared equally, like 
the booty of brigands, and feasted upon in 
the common den." After the first winter 
Mademoiselle Delaunay 's room had been done 
up and furnished by the business agents of 
Monsieur du Maine. It looked very habitable, 
and its occupier specially appreciated the un- 
accustomed luxury of a mantel-piece where she 

could "put down a book or a snufF-box." The 

169 



170 LOVE AND TREACHERY 

room was so attractive that it had soon become 
the favourite meeting - place of the community, 
to the secret annoyance of its mistress, who was 
gradually succumbing to an enchanting dream 
of happiness, in which one person only did not 
seem an intruder. 

The Chevalier du Menil, handsome, generous, 
noble - minded to all appearance, loved her, or 
at least seemed to love her, and she believed in 
his whole-heartedness, and was supremely happy 
in her love for him. Monsieur de Maisonrouge, 
a blunt, rough soldier in appearance, and a high- 
minded, unselfish friend in reality, loved her also, 
and though she did not love him, she made use 
of him to increase her happiness, for he was the 
officer in charge, and ever ready to grant her 
slightest wishes, if it were in his power. 

Monsieur de Maisonrouge, having his own 
simple conception of the feminine species, had first 
offered a stout resistance to the Governor's sug- 
gestion that he should go and see Mademoiselle 
Delaunay and Mademoiselle de Montauban, the 
only two women of note whom the Sceaux 
conspiracy had brought to the Bastille. " What 
would you have me say to these perouelles,'' he 
had objected, " who will do nothing but scream 
and weep?" He was assured that they were 
not at all as desperate as he imagined, and 
he reluctantly went to see them. The bear was 



MONSIEUR DE MAISONROUGE 171 

tamed; he left Mademoiselle Delaunay's room 
completely subjugated, and from that day 
onwards he paid her most gallant attentions, 
striving manfully to keep up with what he felt 
to be her very dazzling conversation — except on 
the occasions when she happened to speak on the 
side of his deaf ear — for he had been much too 
shy to confess to her this infirmity ! Through 
his efforts, all kinds of little favours were given 
to Mademoiselle Delaunay ; she felt his devotion 
surrounding her on all sides. 

" He is the only man," she says of him, " by 
whom I have felt that I was truly loved, although 
it has happened to me, as it does to all women, to 
find several men who have shown me love. This one 
said nothing about his feelings, and I think I knew 
of them long before he did. He was so preoccupied 
with the thought of me that he spoke of nothing 
else. I was the only subject of his conversations 
with all the prisoners whom he went to see ; and 
he was simple-minded enough to think that it 
was they who constantly spoke of me to him. He 
came back to me, quite delighted with the pre- 
tended esteem in which all held me. 'It is 
astonishing,' he used to say to me, ' how they all 
admire you, and how much everybody here is 
interested in you ; they speak of you constantly, 
and I can go nowhere without hearing your 
praises.' This became true later on, when they 
had noticed the extreme pleasure which it gave 
him. Being dependent on people produces 



172 LOVE AND TREACHERY 

flattery ; captives make use of it towards their 
gaolers as courtiers do towards their sovereigns. 
Once the weak point of De Maisonrouge had 
been discovered, people under him bethought 
themselves of winning his goodwill through 
pandering to his weakness. Some began to 
send me refreshments, others amusing books ; all 
of them, according to their power, paid me some 
sort of homage which always passed through 
him." 

It was thus also that the Chevalier de Menil 
came into Mademoiselle Delaunay's life. 

" He took advantage," she says in her Memoirs, 
*' of a dream which he had had, or pretended to 
have had, in order to pay his court to his master. 
He said to him one day that the night before 
he had dreamed that his sentence had been 
passed — it was indeed a prisoner's dream — and 
that he had been condemned to the Bastille for 
life, in company with me, however, who was 
never to leave prison either — and that this 
circumstance had made up to him for the 
severity of the judgment. This seemed to 
Maisonrouge to be flattering for me, coming 
from one who had never seen me, and the 
prospect of keeping me under his supervision 
for ever did not displease him either. He came 
to me at once to regale me with this tale, and 
1 don't know why I paid more attention to it 
than I usually did to similar things which he 
was accustomed to say to me." 



THE CHEVALIER DE MENIL 173 

By the law of premonitions this acquaintance 
which had hardly begun was destined to be of 
some significance, and indeed it grew quickly 
into an intimacy. Simple, good-natured De 
Maisonrouge helped it as much as lay in his 
power, unaware as yet that he was helping to 
prepare for the breaking of his own kind heart 
in the very near future. 

"He went," as the Memoirs say, "to see De 
Menil, and the latter having mentioned verses in 
the course of conversation. ' You ought to write 
some,' he said to him, 'just to amuse your 
neighbour.' His room was opposite mine. ' That 
is all very well,' said De Menil, ' but how ? I have 
neither paper nor pen.' * If that is the only 
difficulty,' rejoined the lieutenant, 'here is a pencil 
and some paper, you have but to write.' He 
wrote some verses composed very hastily on a 
scrap of paper which Maisonrouge brought me, 
delighted to have procured this new diversion for 
me. ' To make it still better,' he said to me, 
* answer in the same vein, I shall give you what 
you want to write with.' This beginning of 
an adventure pleased me immensely. I was 
very grateful to the King's lieutenant for his 
kindness. Upon my answer came another the 
next day, to which I was again asked to 
reply. Maisonrouge, seeing nothing in this joke 
which could be of any concern to the King 
or the State, and perceiving that I took great 
pleasure in it, encouraged us to go on, and 



174 LOVE AND TREACHERY 

we were delighted to do so. Our poetry, though 
it was mere doggerel, did not always flow very 
easily ; 1 insinuated that prose, being easier to 
write, would be more agreeable. The lieutenant 
gave his consent to that also, in the kindness of 
his heart, and every day he brought an open 
letter and carried back my answer." 

If De Maisonrouge had at that time been 
capable of logical thinking, he would have 
remembered that he who gives his little finger 
will soon have to give his whole arm ; and so 
it happened to him without delay. De Menil 
began to feel that correspondence was insufficient 
and that conversation would be more satisfactory, 
and though Mademoiselle Delaunay, from more 
or less romantic reasons, was opposed to it, an 
interview was arranged. 

" Menil was very curious to see me," we read 
in the Memoirs. "He spoke of it from time to 
time in his letters. I persisted in my opinion 
that the charm of our adventure lay in our 
never having seen each other, that in losing this 
advantage, it would become commonplace, far 
less piquant, and that our relations would become 
strained. In spite of these wise representations, 
his request for an interview became more and 
more pressing. At last De Maisonrouge showed 
us to each other by placing us each on our own 
doorstep. We both felt rather abashed, perhaps 
from the fact that we felt we must now come 



TONGUE - TIED 175 

down in our expectations. We said nothing to 
each other — such was the agreement made — and, 
after a few minutes, we both disappeared. The 
letters which followed this 'apparition' betrayed 
the harm it had done to our prestige. I noticed 
it. It provided me with some new subjects for 
pleasantry; we had exhausted all that could be 
made out of our first relations ! 

" Prisoners, however, are not people to get easily 
discouraged. The Chevalier, thinking that a con- 
versation would be more resourceful than this 
mere glimpse of one another, represented to the 
lieutenant that the favour he had granted was 
too small, that this could not be called seeing 
each other, that getting acquainted meant to 
talk to one another; at last he wrung from him 
that supreme favour. The lieutenant brought him 
to my room one evening. I had gone to bed, 
and in order not to hinder our conversation, he 
left him standing at my pillow and went to the 
further end of the room to talk to Mademoiselle 
Hondel. Renewed embarrassment took hold of 
us. The Chevalier, like Tonquin d'Armorique, 
who, after he had found his love, did not know 
what in the world to say to her, found nothing 
to say to me. We had no more reason to be 
satisfied with each other, on further acquaint- 
ance, than we had been when we had first met. 
Maisonrouge, noticing that our conversation 
dragged, came forward to help it on. It went 
a little better with him ; but was altogether so 
short that we hardly had time to realise each 
other." 



176 LOVE AND TREACHERY 

The romance was in danger of flagging ; 
Mademoiselle Delaunay revived its fire by means 
of a little feminine ruse. Whitsuntide was 
approaching, and she pretended that whilst pre- 
paring for it, she must give up all worldly 
diversions and, amongst them, her correspon- 
dence. This plan did not meet with as much 
objection as she had hoped. 

"I was extremely piqued," she owns, "by the 
small resistance offered to my decision, and this 
feeling, out of all proportion to its cause, made 
me fear the existence of an even more serious 
sentiment. This apprehension, added to my pique, 
helped me to keep to my decision. The faithful 
Maisonrouge still remained to me, more assiduous, 
more attached and less favoured than ever." 

Indeed, after Whitsuntide was over, he even 
tried to make up for past renunciations by pro- 
posing that the Chevalier and Mademoiselle 
Delaunay should breakfast together. 

" We took tea together," she says, " with a certain 
air of unconcern. Soon after that De Menil dis- 
covered a way of unlocking his own door, so that 
interview's could take place even without De 
Maisonrouge's intervention, and while he was 
having supper with the Governor of the Bastille, 
innocent of any suspicion, conversations could be 
carried on in peace until the clanking of the sentinel's 
picket upon the pavement of the courtyard warned 
the prisoners that the lieutenant was returning." 



A DESPERATE SITUATION 177 

That which was bound to happen sooner or 
later, happened one evening when Mademoiselle 
Delaunay imprudently insisted on keeping De 
Menil a little later than usual; the turnkeys, 
whose suspicions had been roused, came round 
earlier than was their custom, locked the doors, 
and took the keys to the lieutenant. 

" I could not describe," exclaims Mademoiselle 
Delaunay, " the utter dismay I felt when I heard the 
keys turn in the lock. What decision was I to take 
under such fatal circumstances ? The only thing 
which I saw clearly was that the Chevalier de 
Menil must not remain locked up in my room. 
To be found with me during the day time would 
only have been the breach of a rule, of a local 
custom, but to spend the night in my room 
would have meant a scandal in any country. 
And how was I to get him out? The doors 
were barricaded in such a way that nothing 
could be attempted there. The windows were 
not more accessible. There remained to me no 
other resource than the mercy of poor Maison- 
rouge who would be grievously offended by this. 
At last I armed myself with all the courage 
that was necessary on an occasion so pressing, 
and I waited at my window for his return 
from the Governor's rooms, where he was 
supping. 

"As soon as he entered the courtyard, I called to 
him and asked him to come in to say good-night. 
He ran to his rooms to fetch down my keys and 

M 



178 LOVE AND TREACHERY 

came to me, beside himself with joy at this 
unaccustomed favour. I went up to him — his 
rival, who was standing in the background, was 
yet hidden from his view. I said to him in a 
most embarrassed manner : ' You taught your 
neighbour the way to my apartments ; he has 
very indiscreetly taken it without your help. 
Meanwhile they have locked us in, you would 
not, I am sure, leave him here with me, rid me 
of him, I beseech you I ' At the first word I 
uttered, he caught sight of the Chevalier de 
Menil, and his expression changed. The air of 
gaiety which he had had on coming in, gave place 
to the utmost gloom, and he said to us very 
curtly that this put him into a very awkward 
position, that he could not fetch Monsieur de Menil's 
keys, come down again, and open his room without 
attracting the notice of his servants, and giving 
rise to suspicions which would be as detrimental 
to me as they would be to him. I owned that 
he had reason to complain of our imprudence. I 
confessed that I was in the wrong, and promised 
not to transgress again ; I implored his friendship 
as my only resource. He left me without further 
comment, went to fetch the keys, came back to 
take away De Menil who was more disconcerted 
than any of us, locked him into his room, and 
did not return to mine." 

This unpleasant adventure ought to have 
cured the two of their temerity, but it was 
to be foreseen that it would not. They were 
caught again, and this time with more serious 



CAUGHT AGAIN 179 

consequences. The Memoirs relate this as 
follows : — 

" One day, when we thought ourselves more 
secure than ever because the lieutenant had gone 
to dine at Vincennes with the Marquis du 
Chatelet, his friend and former colonel, Monsieur 
Leblanc came to the Bastille to say to the Governor 
that he needed some explanation in reference to 
a declaration imputed to the Chevalier de Menil, 
and that he must see him about it at once. The 
Governor, who was at dinner, left the table, and 
ran with such speed to fetch De Menil that the 
latter, who was with me when we became aware 
that the Governor was going to his room, had 
not time to get there before him. The Governor 
did not find him there, but Menil joined him 
quickly enough to face the whole outburst of 
his anger of which the echoes only reached me. 
After his access of fury was over, he gave the 
Minister's message, and carried the answer to 
him without saying anything of what had just 
happened, and for which his lack of vigilance 
would have been made responsible. But as soon 
as Monsieur Leblanc had gone, he ordered the 
Chevalier de Menil to be transferred to one of the 
towers and lodged in a kind of cell w^hich was very 
far away from my apartment. The severity of 
this treatment, and the unpleasant construction 
which could be put on so hurried a removal, over- 
whelmed me with dismay. Contrary to my custom 
I gave myself up to tears and to despair. Never 
had a feehng as desperate as this filled my heart ; I 
felt as if my very soul had been torn out of me," 



180 LOVE AND TREACHERY 

This last sentence marks very fairly the degree 
of intensity to which Mademoiselle Delaunay's 
passion had risen during the few months which 
had elapsed. She had begun by carefully guarding 
against emotional surprises ; she had even, after 
De Menil's first protestations of love, written a 
very wise and very well-balanced letter, in which 
she had said that to listen to these would be 
to disavow the principles on which her whole 
life had been built up, and that she did not wish 
to add to the misfortunes which Fate had put 
upon her— those into which her own imprudence 
might drive her, and which would be all the 
more felt because she would be entirely responsible 
for them. This letter had not meant more than 
do most of its kind in similar circumstances ; 
prudence had written, but passion acted with 
total disregard of this, and when it seemed needful. 
Mademoiselle Delaunay proved her inconsistency 
by rousing jealousy in her swain, with a feeling of 
quite natural elation. There was not only faith- 
ful De Maisonrouge to be used as an instrument 
on those occasions, but also the famous Due de 
Richelieu, whose windows were exactly opposite 
hers, and who loved to while away his time with 
a little aerial conversation. His lightheartedness 
was proverbial, as was the procession of carriages 
which could be seen advancing towards the Bastille 
on the days when the Due was known to take 



THE DUC DE RICHELIEU 181 

his walks on the ramparts. The carriages filled 
the whole length of the street from the Porte 
Saint Antoine to the moats of the prison ; and it 
was a rather piquant spectacle to see women, who 
bitterly hated each other for their rivalry in the 
Due's affections, meet that day, in a common 
effort to catch a distant glimpse of the careless 
cavalier. Some women were there who had been 
the Regent's mistresses, and whom he had im- 
pudently stolen from his sovereign ; Mademoiselle 
de Valois, the Regent's own daughter, and 
Mademoiselle de Charolais were there. It was 
even whispered that they had disguised them- 
selves as women of the common people to go 
and see Richelieu at the Bastille. 

Between times, this irresistible conqueror had 
to content himself with what the Bastille itself 
could offer, and he had discovered, without diffi- 
culty, that Mademoiselle Delaunay was amusing. 
One day, among others, he helped in his careless 
way to rouse useful jealousy in the Chevalier de 
Menil's heart. 

" One evening Maisonrouge had brought me the 
contents of his hunter s bag," says Mademoiselle 
Delaunay, " and he was supping with me when 
Menil, who had discovered how to unlock his door, 
came and listened at mine. He pretended after- 
wards that I had been very gay, and that I had 
spoken of him with a lightheartedness which was 

m2 



182 LOVE AND TREACHERY 

offensive. But what displeased him still more was, 
that on leaving the table, and as it was extremely 
hot, we sat down at the window. The lieutenant 
asked me to sing. I began a scene from the opera, 
Iphigenia. The Due de Richelieu, who was at his 
window also, sang the responses of Orestes in this 
scene, which was exactly suited to our circum- 
stances ; Maisonrouge, who thought that it would 
amuse me, let us finish the whole scene. It did not 
amuse the Chevalier de Menil at all. The next 
day, in his letters, he asked questions about the 
conversation at supper; I did not know that he 
had listened to it. I had forgotten that we had 
mentioned him at all, and I said nothing about 
this to him. He construed it as the making of 
a mystery, about which he was so outrageously 
angry that he wanted me to break off all inter- 
course with De Maisonrouge." 

This request was hardly necessary, for poor De 
Maisonrouge was becoming of less and less 
account. Rondel, Mademoiselle Delaunay's maid, 
was first employed to carry some of the letters 
between the two correspondents, some turnkeys 
were won over by De Menil to perform the same 
offices, and in their case there was no point of 
delicacy which demanded the letters to be sent 
open ; finally, as the months went on, Madame de 
Pompadour's intercessions with the Regent obtained 
full liberty of intercourse between all the con- 
spirators which were still at the Bastille. This was 
the final blow for poor De Maisonrouge ; but the day 




ARMAND DU PLESSIS, 
Due DE Richelieu. 



To yace p, 1S2. 



EXIT DE MAISONEOUGE 183 

on which the new liberties were first enjoyed left an 
indelible impression on Mademoiselle Delaunay. 
She describes it in her Memoirs, with all 
details. 

*' When I was least expecting it," she says, " I 
saw De Menil enter my room, without any pre- 
cautions. I was surprised and afraid ; he reassured 
me by announcing to me the happy news. I was 
overwhelmed with joy in spite of the sadness I 
felt at my sister's death, the circumstances of which 
had filled my heart with great bitterness. It must 
be owned, to the shame of natural feeling, that 
nature's voice is hardly heard when passion speaks 
at the same time. 

" Messieurs de Pompadour et de Boisdavis came 
in a little later to congratulate me on the increase 
of conviviality. The King's lieutenant had gone 
to dine at Vincennes on that day; on his return 
he came to me, ignorant still of what had been 
granted to the Chevalier de Menil. When he saw 
him in my room, in such good company, and with 
every appearance of having a right to be there, 
he remained thunderstruck, speechless and motion- 
less. I was touched by his grief, and, going up to 
him, I told him that Madame de Pompadour 
had obtained permission for us all to see each 
other. He had known that she was petitioning 
for this, but he had not believed that it would 
come so soon. He said to us, in rather forced 
tones, that it was but meet and right and that he 
congratulated us upon this, but he could not utter 
one other word, and remained glued to the seat he 



184 LOVE AND TREACHERY 

had taken, like one petrified. The gaiety of the 
assembly put the last touch to his confusion, and 
not being able to stand so painful a situation, he 
left us." 

There was a final explanation between the two 
a little later, so high-minded and generous on the 
part of De Maisonrouge that his heroism deserves 
to be quoted. 

" My dear friend," he said, " you are happy now. 
I had wished for it, but your happiness costs dear 
to my heart. Live in peace with one who is dear 
to you, but do not ask me to witness it. As long 
as I could be of any help to you I overcame my 
repugnance by inconceivable efforts ; I should do 
it still if it could be of any use to you ; but you 
no longer have need of me. Allow me henceforth 
to come to you only when propriety or some 
service which I may still be able to render you 
will demand it of me. ... I sacrifice myself un- 
reservedly to your happiness ; may the man who 
is to give it to you be as faithful and as devoted 
to you as I am." 

Happiness is generous of small gifts. 

" I insisted," says Mademoiselle Delaunay, 
"on his continuing to see me, and I won my 
point. I promised him to keep out of his sight 
anything that might wound him ; and I was careful 
that he should not meet the Chevalier de Menil 
when he came to my room, which was very 
rare." 



INCONVENIENT POPULARITY 185 

She was not always equally tolerant of society. 

" I was much annoyed," she owns, " by the easy 
access to my room granted to the people whom I 
looked upon with indifference. They did not look 
upon me in the same way, and this increased my 
annoyance. If, as a good author has said, even a 
gardener is a man in the eyes of nuns, a woman, 
whatever she may be, is a goddess in the eyes of 
prisoners. Ours did certainly dedicate a kind of 
worship to me ; but their vows and their incense 
often nearly suffocated me. . . . They all assembled 
in my room so continually that I was often beside 
myself and so bad tempered that Menil reprimanded 
me severely, without any consideration for the 
cause of my annoyance, which deserved much in- 
dulgence on his part." 

These disadvantages were a small price to pay, 
for the happiness which filled her. 

'' I wished," she says, " for no other liberty than 
that which I enjoyed; it seemed to me that no 
other world existed outside my prison walls. It 
is the only happy time I ever spent in my life. 
I could not have believed that happiness would 
attend me there, and that everywhere else I 
should seek for it in vain ! Every one awaited 
with avidity the new^s which should announce 
our speedy liberation. I pretended, in order to 
save my dignity, to desire it like the others, 
although at the bottom of my heart I was far 
from wishing it." 

Had she known the disillusionments which 



186 LOVE AND TREACHERY 

would attend her days of liberty, she would have 
wished still more fervently for indefinite imprison- 
ment. De Menil, in whom she believed so implicitly, 
whom she had made the centre of her universe, was 
even then planning for himself a successful future 
in which she was to have no part. 



CHAPTER XV 

RELEASE OF THE SCEAUX CONSPIRATORS 

As time went on the little company of Sceaux 
conspirators dwindled away ; more and more 
frequently the prison gates opened and let out 
those who had confessed. The first to go were 
Mademoiselle de Montauban, young Monsieur de 
Malezieu, and Barjeton, one of the lawyers who had 
been employed by the Duchesse du Maine. His 
colleague Davisard had to wait considerably 
longer, and to him waiting was a torture. This 
man of whom it was said that it was easier for him 
to be in several places at the same time than to be 
in the same place for any length of time, at last 
fretted himself into a serious illness. It brought 
him his release ; the Regent had no wish to let 
any one cheat him by dying in prison, and he sent 
an order to set the prisoner free. " Isn't this a 
hoax ? " said Davisard, from the depths of his bed, 
when he saw the lettre de cachet. " No," said the 
Governor, "it is genuine." "My stockings, my 
breeches, quick, quick," said the prisoner, hurling 
himself out of bed. His dressing, his departure, 
his cure, all was effected in one brief moment I 

187 



188 RELEASE OF THE CONSPIRATORS 

Monsieur de Malezieu was, of all the con- 
spirators, in the most critical position; it was 
impossible for him to deny his partnership in the 
fatal letter, the pasted pieces of which proclaimed 
his guilt beyond refutation, and yet he maintained 
a dogged silence which drove his judges to the last 
limits of exasperation. At last a rumour began 
to spread that he was to be removed to the Con- 
ciergerie and executed after a very summary trial. 

Madame du Maine was much affected by the 
news, and she herself was not bearing with much 
philosophy what she termed the "horrors of her 
lonely captivity." She had a maid-of-honour, 
a lady-in-waiting, a chaplain, a doctor, and five 
waiting- women ; but, as Mademoiselle Delaunay 
remarks, "princes feel lonely unless they are in 
a crowd." As to "horrors," she had found 
Dijon damp, and she had been allowed to 
move to Chalons. Chalons seeming to her damp 
also, and of objectionable architecture, the Regent 
had given her a choice between two country- 
houses in the neighbourhood. But in spite of 
this Madame du Maine declared every day that 
she was a victim of the most cruel, unfair, and 
rigorous measures. Madame, the Regent's mother, 
says that " she played cards and beat her en- 
tourage alternately " all day long ; but it is hardly 
probable that her versatile mind could have been 
satisfied with such a limited range of occupations. 



THE DUCHESSE RESTLESS 189 

What is quite certain is that she made the most 
of a pathetic situation. She played cards " sadly " 
with her attendants, and interrupted herself now 
and again to exclaim with dramatic melancholy : 
" Let the Regent judge of my pains by my 
pleasures ! " She was as fond as ever of classical 
quotations, and when she declared more or less 
opportunely, " Aux fureurs de Junon, Jupiter 
m'abandonne," the tender-hearted La Billarderie, 
unused to classical lore, would fall a prey to 
profound and puzzled despair. 

As the months passed the Duchesse grew 
weary of her role of " Orlando Furioso," to quote 
Madame again, and she yearned to obtain her 
liberty at any price. Monsieur de Malezieu's 
unflinching spirit was now the only obstacle in 
her path ; it piqued her pride and she felt that 
she could not stoop to a confession, before he 
had yielded. The Regent, on his side, was 
more than wishful to bring to an end a business 
which had entailed endless trouble, yet he also 
desired to see his honour safe and his dealings 
justified by a full confession of the culprits. 
At this juncture, Madame la Princesse, who, in 
the beginning of her daughter's troubles, had 
been forced to exercise more energy and initiative 
than she had ever shown before, decided to 
ascertain the calibre of Monsieur de Malezieu's 
resisting power. It was a difficult task, the 



190 RELEASE OF THE CONSPIRATORS 

most contradictory rumours being circulated on 
that subject; but at last it was declared to 
Madame du Maine, on the best authority, that 
the citadel had fallen. The faithful La Billarderie 
brought this good news, and the truth of it 
was attested by Madame la Princesse and many 
others who were anxious to bring about a 
favourable dMoument. 

The Duchesse was wise enough not to enquire 
too much into the strict truth of this statement ; 
she sat down without demurring, and wrote a 
most detailed confession of her doings "in order," 
as we are told, "to prove her sincerity." Before 
there had been time to read the document to the 
Council of the Regency, the courier, who had 
carried it to the Regent, brought back the lettre 
de cachet which set Madame du Maine free. She 
received it with transports of joy; only one 
unexpected clause in it — the stipulation that 
she should reside at Sceaux — caused her some 
disappointment. 

Monsieur le Due du Maine was released about 
the same time as the Duchesse, in January 1720. 
From the day of his arrest he had kept up 
consistently his attitude of a frightened hare, 
startled at each unexplained noise, shrinking 
from all unfamiliar sights. Each time his prison 
door opened, he expected to see the executioner 
with his fatal axe. He steadfastly repudiated 



A FRANK CONFESSION 191 

any connection with his wife's imprudent dealings, 
and the testimonies of all those concerned tallied 
entirely with his declarations. " Monsieur le Due 
du Maine was not advised of this," " Monsieur le 
Due du Maine was carefully kept in ignorance 
of the measures taken," are sentences which 
constantly recur in the evidence given. The 
Duchesse's emphatic declarations on that subject 
provoked a general smile, when they were read 
aloud before the Council of the Kegency. 

The Due d'Orleans was quite safe in giving 
back their liberty to his formidable opponents ; 
at the beginning of the year 1720 there were 
very few people who took them seriously. 

The conspiracy of Sceaux, or rather the leisure 
for reflection which it afforded to the conspirators 
during their incarceration, had one unexpected 
consequence. While simulating the broken reed 
in his prison of Dourlens, the Due du Maine was 
in reality steeling himself to the most momentous 
decision of his life. One of Madame's remarks 
gives us a clue to the situation. " The Due du 
Maine," she declares, "has written to his sister: 
' It is not into prison, but into a strait waistcoat 
that they ought to have put me, for having thus 
allowed myself to be led by the nose.'" The 
Due du Maine was meditating upon the ad- 
visability of a legal separation from his turbulent 
wife I He feared the extravagance of her expenses 



192 RELEASE OF THE CONSPIRATORS 

as much as the waywardness of her caprices, 
and at last he resolved to repair to Clagny, one 
of his country seats, and from this safe and 
distant shelter to open negotiations with Sceaux. 

Public rumour was apprised of this earlier 
than Madame du Maine, but no one dared break 
to her the news of such an astounding defection. 
She was journeying by slow stages from her 
Burgundy residence towards Sceaux, in her own 
carriages, which had been sent to meet her 
by order of the Regent ; and at each posting 
station she had expected to find her husband in 
readiness, eager to take upon himself the familiar 
yoke. But disappointment followed upon dis- 
appointment, and the members of her escort were 
groaning under the necessity of finding evasive 
answers to her pressing questions, when, to their 
relief, an imprudent postmaster at Fontainebleau 
revealed the truth. 

Madame du Maine, says Mademoiselle 
Delaunay, "was seized with astonishment and 
indignation at this news, and wanted to have an 
immediate explanation. Bad luck being very 
persistent in the choice of its victims, this 
delicate business fell to the lot of poor, faithful 
La Billarderie, who floundered even more than 
usual, and patiently bowed his head under the 
storm which his explanations raised." 

Another painful surprise awaited Madame du 



FRIENDLESS SOLITUDE 19S 

Maine at Sceaux ; she found her old residence 
a desolate solitude, none of her friends were 
there to greet her, not even one member of her 
family, although she had been given the formal 
assurance that she would find her children there 
on her arrival. She was informed that the right 
to allow access to Sceaux rested with Madame 
la Princesse, her mother. The crafty Regent 
had in this way prolonged the chastisement, 
while seeming to retain no responsibility in the 
matter, and he had every reason to think that 
his deputy had been far too terror - stricken 
by recent events not to be over-strict in the 
exercise of her duties. Under this new regime 
at Sceaux Madame du Maine must have felt at 
times as if she had gone back to the old tyranny 
of her childish days, only — and therein lay the 
ignominy of the situation — she was now forty- 
five, and her mentor bore the features of her 
meek, affrighted little mother. 

The Due du Maine's fine resistance lasted just 
six months. As long as he remained firm in his 
refusal to see his wife, the danger of a surrender 
on his part was comparatively small ; his position 
was impregnable ; he had plenty of grounds 
for his decision, and the conditions he proposed 
were most fair. Foremost among them was an 
offer to pay his wife, out of his considerable 
fortune, a yearly pension, in return for the privilege 



N 



194 RELEASE OF THE CONSPIRATORS 

of being allowed to live in peace. The Duchesse, 
however, would have none of these negotiations. 
She hurried impatiently through the endless letters 
he sent, and never wavered in her conviction that 
she could easily pull down this laborious edifice 
of resistance, if only she could gain access to 
the rebel. 

An interview was effected at last, and its easily 
foreseen result was that the Due du Maine put 
away his artillery of war, his pens, and his papers, 
and returned obediently to his old haunts and his 
useful occupations. His favourite, isolated turret 
saw him again at work on his accounts, which 
were in sad need of his care. He was submissive 
as ever ; in one thing only did he remain obdurate. 
Monsieur de Malezieu, though pardoned by the 
Regent, should not return to Sceaux, nor were 
any of those who had even the most distant 
likeness to conspirators to cross its threshold. 

It was a sad year which the Duchesse du 
Maine spent from January to December 1720. 
Her days were empty, her life was disorganised, 
her mind unoccupied ; her reputation for being 
a bel-esprit was in great danger ; there was nothing 
left to her to stimulate her wits, except an un- 
ending correspondence with her " Oracle," whom 
the Due du Maine had installed at a safe distance 
in one of his country houses. The Cardinal de 
Polignac, in his exile at the abbey of Anchin, 



THE PRUDENT CARDINAL 195 

preserved an injured and prudent silence, nursing 
many grudges ; his manuscript of the Anti- 
Lucrece, seized with other papers at Madame du 
Maine's, had not been returned to him for a long 
time, and he had not forgotten yet the anxieties 
he had suffered on that account. So great was 
the caution which he had sworn to observe 
thenceforth, that he shrank with physical repug- 
nance, even from a copy of Madame du Maine's 
*' Declaration to the Regent " sent by her for his 
perusal. He w^ould have nothing to do with 
seditious writings, and it was only after his 
secretary had vouched for the harmlessness of the 
said document, that he could get reconciled to the 
idea of having received it at all. His prudence 
never forsook him — he even avoided social 
functions at which he was likely to meet his 
former " Circe," and once only, on the eve of his 
departure for Rome, a safely distant residence, 
did he appear at Sceaux again to make warm 
protestations of friendship. From that day he 
was lost for good to Madame du Maine, who 
never heard from him again. 

Six months elapsed before Mademoiselle 
Delaunay was allowed to leave her prison and to 
return to Sceaux. The Regent had been heard 
to exclaim that she should be made to speak like 
all the others, but after sixteen months in the 
Bastille she was as elusive as ever in her answers. 



196 RELEASE OF THE CONSPIRATORS 

as ready with her teasing methods. A few days 
before her release, the Governor sent her the 
intimation that Monsieur Leblanc was waiting for 
her declaration. 

" I answered," she reports, " that I did not 
know what he meant by a 'declaration,' that I 
had only met with such things in novels, and that, 
presumably, it was not the kind of thing Monsieur 
Leblanc expected from me! I added, however, 
that I would write to him to ascertain what he 
required ! " 

Madame du Maine sent her an imperative 
command to write all she knew of the affair. 
" And so I wrote," she says, " but without priding 
myself on being sincere, and I wrote only what 
I knew they least cared to read." 



CHAPTER XVI 

EVENTFUL YEARS, 1720-1730 

While Madame du Maine was disdainfully 
drawing round her again the magic circle which 
separated her from the rest of a negligeable 
world, France had gone through an incredible 
series of dramatic events ; the apotheosis of 
Dubois, created Cardinal, a gorgeous and 
scandalous ceremony at which the whole Court 
had been present, with the exception of Saint- 
Simon, who boasted of being the only titled man 
honoured by an exclusion — the death of the 
Cardinal Minister two years later, amidst general 
abhorrence. " J'espere que ce temps-ci fera partir 
mon drole," the Regent had said on the morning 
of the very hot day on which he died. Other 
events had roused to the utmost the emotions 
of France; the total collapse of Law's system 
and Law's bank in the Rue Quincampoix, and 
the ruin of thousands of people. Law himself, 
who had become a Catholic and a Frenchman, 
whose sons had danced the Royal Minuet with 
the boy princes of the blood, had reaped the fruits 

197 N 2 



198 EVENTFUL YEARS 

of his labours at last. He had been attacked by 
an infuriated mob, had seen his carriage wrecked 
and shattered, and had barely escaped with his 
life. " What ! has Law himself not been torn to 
pieces ? " was the cold - blooded comment of a 
magistrate, when the news of the outrage had 
been announced in Parliament. 

The young King had been at death's door, 
had been saved against all expectations, and had 
been betrothed against his will to the Infanta 
of Spain, a baby girl of three. The dignity of 
the eleven - year - old boy had no doubt been 
vaguely offended by the choice of so very juvenile 
a bride ; at any rate the tears had welled up in 
his eyes when the proposal had been made to 
him, and he had given his formal consent before 
the Privy Council in a very low and constrained 
voice. The little Infanta had arrived and been 
received with great pomp. She was fast forgetting 
Spain and the memories of her babyhood. Madame 
de Ventadour, the young King's former governess, 
had been assigned to her as chief lady-in-waiting, 
and on her lap the little Princess could be seen 
following the hunt with all the gravity of a serious 
Spanish baby. The young King had been crowned 
and anointed at Rheims, and at the end of the 
same year 1723, the Regent had died quite 
suddenly of apoplexy. Though the Regency 
proper had ceased at the coming of age of the 



VERSAILLES AND SCEAUX 199 

King, a few months before, he had still nominally 
ruled France as its Prime Minister. To whom 
should the direction of affairs be given henceforth ? 
The natural successor was the Regent's son, but 
he was barely twenty, and totally unversed in 
public affairs. The choice of the Council fell 
therefore on the next in dignity — Monsieur le 
Due, head of the house of Conde. 

The fact that Madame du Maine's nephew had 
been appointed Prime Minister did not establish 
any closer link between Versailles and Sceaux. 
For years Monsieur le Due had been on the side 
of the enemy in the great litigation between the 
legitimate and the legitimised princes ; he had 
been the Duchesse's " gaoler," or so she had con- 
sidered him during her imprisonment at Pignerol, 
and she detested him cordially. It was nothing 
to her that he had redeemed the fortunes of the 
Condes, beautified Chantilly beyond measure, paid 
off those creditors who in her childhood days had 
so crowded the passages of the castle that at 
times circulation had been difficult ; nor was it 
of any account to her that all this had been 
done, thanks to the gigantic fortune which the 
Due had made in the infamous Rue Quincampoix. 

If Sceaux ignored Versailles, Versailles on the 
other hand found no interest in Sceaux. There 
was nothing there which could have attracted 
the young King; he neither appreciated its com- 



200 EVENTFUL YEARS 

merce de beaux-esprits, nor its luxuriant gardens, 
its arbours of Persian lilac and Bengal roses, its 
exotic hot-house flowers, which Madame du Maine 
loved with an hereditary love. He was only 
happy at Rambouillet, the residence of the Comte 
de Toulouse, and the best hunting ground in the 
kingdom. 

The queen of Sceaux might have been jealous 
of this renewed preference shown to her brother- 
in-law, the same who had basked in the sun of 
the Regent's favours whilst the house of Maine 
was plunged into utter abasement ; she had, how- 
ever, in theory at least, abjured all rivalry. It 
is true her many legal researches had not had the 
results she had hoped for, but they had brought 
her knowledge of a very pleasant nature — the 
inferiority to herself of most of those dukes and 
peers who had tried to trample under their feet 
the dignity of the house of Maine. She had 
discovered, and had taken care to make known 
to the world, that the proud De Luynes were 
descended from an insignificant little lawyer, the 
Richelieus from a lute-player, the De la Roche- 
foucaulds from a butcher, the De Noailles from 
a servant of the Comte de Beaufort. She 
loved to dwell on these discoveries in moments 
of dejection, and they were a balm to many 
small wounds. 

One of these was, perhaps, the growing popularity 



CARDINAL DE FLEURY 201 

of the Princesse de Conti. The Contis were a 
younger branch of the Conde family, their beautiful 
seat at I'lsle d'Adam was famous for the Venetian 
fetes given on its illuminated canals on which 
flower - bedecked boats glided to the strains of 
LuUi and Rameau. Madame du Maine could 
easily have borne a rivalry in outward display, but 
the point which rankled in her heart was that 
the Princesse de Conti's salon counted more 
and more as one of the centres of intellectual life. 
It was the most advanced in court circles, and in 
its spirit a precursor of those salons in which later 
on the Encyclopaedists were to attack and to deny 
with ruthless independence of mind. Its precincts 
— and that was perhaps a slight consolation to 
Madame du Maine — were generally shunned by 
the young King; they were practically forbidden 
ground to him, for Cardinal de Fleury looked 
upon risle d'Adam as a hotbed of impiety, and 
Louis XV. was still entirely under the influence 
of his old tutor. 

Cardinal de Fleury 's ascendency in political 
matters was daily gaining in strength, and 
Monsieur le Due was to be deprived of his 
office before long. His chief aim had been to 
raise the financial status of France at all costs, 
and his political enemies had prompted the young 
King with the declaration that he was weary 
of the tyranny of financiers and had decided 



202 EVENTFUL YEARS 

to govern for himself. The last important 
measure taken by Monsiem* le Due was to be 
a very decisive one, however — the annulling of 
Louis XV. 's betrothal to the Infanta of Spain. 
It was imperative that the King should marry 
immediately and have issue, so that the question 
of the succession should be definitely assured ; for 
intrigues were still rife, and France had proofs of 
the fact that Philip V. still watched with feverish 
interest every fluctuation in the King's health. 

And so, one day, in the year 1725, Marie 
Leczinska, living her simple unambitious life in 
Lorraine, heard the wonderful news that she 
was chosen to be Queen of France, and on another 
day, not very long after, the little seven-year- 
old Infanta stood in the private apartments at 
Versailles, surrounded by those who had been 
attached to her small person, and in the dignified 
manner which was hers by inheritance, she thanked 
them gravely for their care and for the interest 
they had taken in her education. Then, in her 
heavy coach drawn by six mules, she set out on 
her way to Spain, escorted by her Cameriera and 
by the Spanish ambassador. 

This event gravely compromised the relations 
between France and Spain, and although the 
urgency of the measure had been fully represented 
to the Spanish Court, the two countries, which 
were so closely allied, stood on the very brink 



THE HOUR AND THE MAN 203 

of a war. To weather the threatening storm, 
there was need of all Cardinal de Fleury's genius 
as a peace-maker, and his successful averting of 
complications did a great deal towards strengthen- 
ing the position which he was to hold for so 
long. For years he was to be chief ruler of 
France, although the power had been nominally 
transferred to the hands of the young King, who 
had come of age three years before his marriage. 



CHAPTER XVII 

V ANITAS, VANITATUM 

It had been the prudent wish of Madame la 
Princesse that Mademoiselle Delaunay should not 
re-enter her daughter's service, but Madame du 
Maine waved aside the suggestion ; there was 
still a great scarcity of intelligent listeners at 
Sceaux, and IMademoiselle Delaunay had decidedly 
proved her value, she was not a person to be 
given up. For the first time the Duchesse deigned 
now to express to her waiting- woman a gratitude 
which had been well earned. An appreciative 
letter reached Mademoiselle Delaunay by secret 
ways, and was read by her with great emotion. 

" I feel more affection and esteem for you than 
ever," said the last lines, " and all you have done 
has not surprised me ; I trusted your intelligence 
and your fidelity. As soon as I have the pleasure 
of seeing you, you will receive proofs of my 
friendship, which you deserve. Good-bye, my 
dear Delaunay." 

In June 1720 the last and the most obdurate 

of the Sceaux conspirators left the Bastille ; but 

204 



DISILLUSIONMENT 205 

to her liberty, so long delayed, had no enchant- 
ments ; her feelings were as contradictory as those 
of the unselfish and devoted Maisonrouge, who 
did not know whether to grieve or to rejoice. The 
love of the Chevalier du Menil had not stood 
the test of the "open air" as she said herself — 
he had left the Bastille some time before her, 
and the last few months had done much towards 
proving his faithlessness. The world seemed 
grey and empty to the woman who felt that 
even her self-respect had been wrecked in this 
last lamentable love affair. All through her 
description of her return to Sceaux there runs 
a note of weary disillusionment. 

" I received with my liberty," she says, " the 
order to start at once for Sceaux, where Madame la 
Duchesse du Maine was staying. I sent to the 
Temple to ask the Abbe de Chaulieu for his 
carriage to take me to his house and then to 
Sceaux. He was already very ill, and his illness 
was to end fatally three weeks later. I saw him 
and realised how indifferent one is to everything 
when one reaches that extremity. He had been 
deeply concerned by my captivity, and now he did 
not seem to be even touched by my release. I felt 
keenly the impending loss of a friend who had ever 
made it his task to put joy into my life, at least as 
much joy as was compatible with my mode of 
living ; but I was not able to stay with the Abbe 
as long as I should have liked ; I had to start 
on my journey without tarrying. 

" T arrived at Sceaux towards evening, Madame 



206 VANITAS, VANITATUM 

la Duchesse du Maine was out driving, and I 
went down through the gardens to meet her. 
She saw me, ordered her coachman to stop, and 
said : ' Ah ! here is Mademoiselle Delaunay. I 
am very glad to see you again.' I went up to 
her, she kissed me, and drove on. I went back to 
the house and was taken to the room which she 
had chosen for me. I was dehghted to find that 
it had a window and a fire-place — and to hear 
that there were two new waiting-women, one to 
replace the head one who had died, and the other 
to occupy the place which had been mine. . . . 
There was hardly any one at Sceaux when I 
went back. The Duchesse d'Estrees only had 
come as soon as she had obtained permission. 

"Madame la Duchesse du Maine was not 
yet allowed to see many people. She used to 
play 'biribi' nearly all night and to sleep during 
the greater part of the day. I was asked to sit 
up and read aloud, just as I had done before. I 
was very much out of practice, and this tedious 
occupation soon made me regret the peace of 
my prison days. Madame la Duchesse talked 
to me about her captivity, and told me all that 
had happened. She talked a great deal, and 
asked very few questions. ..." 

Vanitas, vanitatum ! alas for the glamour which 
once lent enchantment to a princess's protesta- 
tions of attachment, to her wearying confidences 
during the long wakeful hours of the night ! " She 
kissed me and drove on . . . she talked a great 



LIFE AT SCEAUX 807 

deal and asked very few questions ! . . . " With 
what uncompromising sharpness these few clear- 
cut lines, shorn of flourishes of fancy, draw the 
silhouette of irresponsible selfishness. 

By degrees life at Sceaux regained its 
equilibrium ; Monsieur de Malezieu came back 
from Chatenay, Mademoiselle du Maine came 
back from her convent at Chaillot — friends returned, 
old and new. There were some defections : the 
Cardinal de Polignac would never again explain 
his Anti - Lucrece to a fluttering audience of 
admiring women ; De Laval and De Pompadour, 
touched to the quick by the contempt for their 
literary gifts, expressed in Madame du Maine's 
" Declaration," turned their backs upon Sceaux 
and preserved a haughty silence. But for these 
social losses there were some compensations. 
Sceaux had made obeisance to Versailles, the 
candour of its Virgilian atmosphere was not 
marred by the faintest breath of politics ; the 
Regent and even the most cautious of Versailles' 
courtiers confirmed that by their frequent presence. 

The echoes of the peaceful valley of the Bievre 
again resounded with odes and eglogues in praise 
of its familiar genii, and Madame du Maine 
trod its soft lawns and winding paths as Venus, 
Hebe, or Astarte, just as circumstances required. 
Monsieur du Maine, restored to his charges and 
with the hope of being some day restored to his 



208 VANITAS, VANITATUM 

dignities, enjoyed with serenity the new shadow 
of authority which had come to him under the 
new regime. 

No shadow seemed to darken this bright scene, 
except that thrown by a figure which stood neither 
outside nor inside the enchanted circle, but 
hovered ever between the two in all the discomfort 
of a false position. " The distinctions which had 
been granted to me, since I had given up the 
functions and the title of a waiting-woman, had 
no defined limits," complains this victim, " and I 
did not know whether I was inside or outside. 
Whenever I crossed the boundary, either uncon- 
sciously or by order of Madame la Duchesse 
du Maine, the expressions and the murmurs of 
her ladies-in-waiting, careful of the distance which 
should be observed between us, made me realise 
it most unpleasantly." 

Mademoiselle Delaunay's scepticism increased 
perceptibly at that time, and it is not to be 
wondered at. Du Menil has shamefully con- 
fessed his indifference and has married a cousin 
heavily endowed with flesh and with money, but 
very sparsely provided with intelligence. The two 
lovers had been wont to laugh over her letters 
together in the old days of the Bastille. The 
deserted woman has wept her last tears of 
disappointed love, bitter and strenuous tears, of 
which she is ashamed, and which have made her 







MADAME DU CHATELET. 



7 face p. id 



MARQUISE DU DEFFAND 209 

realise all of a sudden that she is old, and that 
to her the world is old and colourless. The 
famous Marquise du DefFand, the sceptic par 
excellence at least in manner and in principle, 
wins her admiring sympathy at the very first 
visit she pays to Sceaux. 

" No one possesses more wit," Mademoiselle 
Delaunay exclaims, " and of so natural a kind ; 
this sparkling fire which fills her puts life into 
everything and penetrates it down to its inner- 
most recesses ; it gives relief to the faintest lines. 
She possesses in a supreme degree the talent of 
depicting a character, and her portraits, which 
are more living than their originals, give a better 
knowledge than one could gain from the closest 
relations with the originals." 

It was under the influence of Madame du 
Deffand that Mademoiselle Delaunay made that 
inventory of her qualities and features which 
resulted in the uncomplimentary portrait of herself 
already quoted. It is a pessimistic production 
from beginning to end ; having shown little 
leniency towards herself, she feels authorised to 
show none at all to others, she declares deliber- 
ately; and disillusionment rings all through the 
last lines of her portrait : 

" She has always been sensitive to friendship, 
but has set more store by the merit and the 
virtue of her friends than by their feeling for her ; 

o 



210 VANITAS, VANITATUM 

she has been indulgent to them, if they have 
only failed her, provided they did not fall short 
of what they ow^ed to themselves. ..." 

The chapter of sentiment and romance is 
closed for Mademoiselle Delaunay and another 
has opened : that of sober considerations. 

As the adaptability of her temperament 
decreased the complications of her position 
increased, and led her to a serious consideration 
of possible means of escape ; two refuges seemed 
within reach — a convent or a mariage de 
convenance. A few legacies from old friends 
made her an eligible candidate for either status, 
and it might have been comparatively easy to 
find an honest commoner, willing to share with 
her his name and the solidity of his bourgeois 
home, in exchange for promotion or the credit 
which might accrue to him from the protection 
of the court of Sceaux. The wife's share in this 
transaction was, so far, slightly problematic, as 
it depended on the good-will of her patrons, and 
Madame du Maine saw treachery in any plan 
which would partly deprive her of very valuable 
services. As to Monsieur du Maine, in all matters 
not political, he had not shaken off his chains 
and could not be relied upon to act independently. 
Mademoiselle Delaunay felt after due consideration, 
that under the circumstances it would be easier 
to enter a convent than to steer safely into the 



THE FAITHFUL LOVER 211 

harbour of matrimony, and, foreseeing Madame 
du Maine's opposition, she decided not to consult 
her. She went secretly to a Carmelite convent 
and asked to be admitted as a novice. The 
nuns did not receive her with that ardour for 
proselytism which is commonly attributed to 
them ; they enquired into the sincerity of this 
sudden vocation, and when the postulant retorted 
by begging them to take her in at once, lest 
her fervour should suddenly evaporate, the Mother 
Superior pushed her back gently into the carriage 
which had brought her. Thus ended Mademoiselle 
Delaunay's only attempt at conventual life. 

The other harbour stiU remained open, and in 
spite of sober reason and sobering experiences, 
she still had a lurking hope that her heart might 
have some share in the satisfaction with which 
she would glide into its shallow waters. The 
absolute devotion of the ex -cavalry captain. 
Monsieur de Maisonrouge, was strong enough to 
throw, even now, some glamour of sentiment over 
a union which was still his one aim ; but now, 
as before, the Chevalier du Menil stood between 
him and Mademoiselle Delaunay, and ere the 
latter had succeeded in shaking herself free of her 
folly, death intervened, and poor faithful De 
Maisonrouge had to go where human desires are 
unfulfilled. 

Once again, later on, sentiment softened with 



212 VANITAS, VANITATUM 

its glow the harsh outUnes of a prospective 
business arrangement, and this was the result of 
Madame de la Fert^'s efforts. The Duchesse, 
reconciled to her protegee since the latter had 
justified her prognostications, was convinced that 
she could be as successful with Mademoiselle 
Delaunay's second "establishment" as she had 
been with the first ! Her choice fell on a dis- 
consolate widower, whose wife had been a very 
intellectual woman. The description of her 
" strategy," as given to her matrimonial candidate, 
shows her as breezy and self-confident as ever : 

" I found at the Marechal de Villeroi's that poor 
Dacier," she writes. " It is pitiful to see him. 
He told us that he was as full of grief as on 
the first day, and ready to die of despair. ' Eh 
bien,' I said to him, 'there is only one way of 
finding comfort, you must marry again.' ' Great 
God ! ' he exclaimed, ' what woman could replace 
the one I have lost ? . . . ' * Mademoiselle 
Delaunay,' I answered. For a few minutes he 
remained silent with astonishment, and after some 
reflexion he said : ' She is the only woman in 
the world with whom I could live, and who 
would not be an offence to the memory of 
Madame Dacier.' 

" The Marechal and I, seeing that he was 
affected, enlarged upon the theme, and we left him 
quite inclined to consider the question. I want 
him to marry you ; he enjoys some celebrity and 
sufficient means. The place you will fill is that 



DACIER 213 

of an illustrious woman ; this marriage will be as 
honourable as it will be useful." 

Having sown her seed in two directions, 
Madame de la Ferte left the rest in the hands of 
Providence, according to her custom. She swore 
that she would bring this matter to a successful 
issue, but she went on a journey and forgot her 
scheme. Meanwhile the seeds were undergoing 
their natural process of germination. Monsieur 
Dacier's recovery was decidedly progressing; the 
comfort held out to him as a possibility had come 
to appear to him a necessity, and he was rumin- 
ating over means to his end, when a move from 
the other side came to his help. Mademoiselle 
Delaunay, anxious to ascertain whether Madame 
de la Ferte's visions could be materialised, sent her 
old friend. Monsieur de Valincourt, as a skilful 
ambassador who could obtain a knowledge of the 
situation without showing too much of his 
credentials. The interview between him and 
Monsieur Dacier was most satisfactory, and media- 
tion soon became quite unnecessary. Through 
some deplorable fatality, however, the more cordial 
Monsieur Dacier's advances became, the more 
determined grew Mademoiselle Delaunay 's reserva- 
tions, and it was only when the finality of death 
broke up the position that she " felt the irreparable 
error which she had committed in missing such a 

splendid opportunity to gain leisure and liberty." 

o 2 



214 VANITAS, VANITATUM 

As an epitaph on a last hope these words 
certainly lack sentiment, and her report on subse- 
quent disappointments strike a still more practical 
business note. These passages of an eighteenth- 
century diary savour strangely of the style to 
be found in the advertisements of a modern 
matrimonial agency. "A man moderately rich, 
in a fairly good position, living a somewhat retired 
life in Paris, required a sensible wife to keep 
him company. As I did not know him," says 
Mademoiselle Delaunay, " I doubted whether I 
could put up with his society. The affair having 
to be concluded with preliminary examination, I 
refused." 

Another affair was not despatched with quite 
so much celerity ; a trusted friend had proposed 
it. This time the candidate was " a member of the 
landed gentry, about fifty years of age, recently 
retired from active service and living on a hand- 
some income in the provinces, in a well-built and 
comfortably-furnished house." It seems that a 
"preliminary examination" was allowed in this 
case, for Mademoiselle Delaunay went to see the 
prospective suitor at the house of the friend who 
was seeking to bring about the marriage. He 
was, we hear, moderatedly handsome and of 
stately presence — the impression made on him by 
Mademoiselle Delaunay was not unfavourable. 
" He did not find me as decrepit as he had 



LOVE AND THE WINDOW 215 

expected," she says, " and, moreover, he was satisfied 
with the small property 1 possessed. . . . He said 
to his friend that he was prepared to conclude the 
business, provided I felt no repugnance for a life 
spent in a country home." 

The prospective bride had, unluckily, a very 
great distaste for seclusion, and it was truly to be 
deplored that most of her suitors had chosen to 
live a retired life. She consulted with one of her 
friends, described the situation, and added the 
cheerful comment that this marriage seemed to 
her like "throwing herself from a window," but 
that, to tell the truth, she had been aiming at that 
for some time past. Only one answer was possible 
to this — the friend wrote that the "window" in 
question was at least a " tenth floor window," that 
it would be wiser not to select it quite so high 
up, and that to live shut in between four walls, 
with some one who would perhaps be incapable of 
pleasing, would be the surest way to turn into a 
reality what so far had only been a figure of speech. 



CHAPTER XVail 

MADAME DU MAINE AS A MATRIMONIAL AGENT 

Madame du Maine was meanwhile also engaged 
in a matrimonial quest ; she realised that the only 
way to retain Mademoiselle Delaunay's services, 
and to keep her tolerably happy, was to marry her 
to some gentleman of the Ducal household, whose 
charge should entail residence at Sceaux, and whose 
position should give his wife the right to figure 
lawfully among the ladies-in-waiting at the Court. 
The Duchesse's statements were more concerned 
with the description of the ''wife offered," and 
Mademoiselle Delaunay repeats with an enviable 
sense of humour what she has heard about it. 

" Madame la Duchesse du Maine," she says, " has 
commissioned Madame de Sully, wife of a Swiss 
officer, to find in the Helvetian corps commanded 
by Monsieur le Due du Maine, a man willing to 
accept a wife who has neither beauty nor youth, 
neither fortune nor family. The whole of the 
thirteen Swiss Cantons would hardly suffice for 
such a discovery ! Naturally the lady took a long 
time about it, and I had quite forgotten her 
commission when, having come to Sceaux one day 

216 



A RETIRED LIFE 217 

she said to me : ' I think that I have found the man 
for whom we are looking. ' She had accompanied her 
husband on a visit to one of his compatriots, and 
had come upon a veritable little idyll." 

A retired life once more ! but the clever mediator 
described it with convincing appreciation. 

" I found a little house very clean and quite new, 
surrounded by pastures with flocks of cows and sheep. 
The master of the house, who is not a young man, 
won my sympathy by his prepossessing appearance. 
He is of gentle birth, a widower, and lives in this 
retreat with two daughters. They seem to be sweet 
and sensible and entirely occupied with the duties 
of housekeeping. He has had very slow promotion, 
although he has been in the army for some time, 
and has always done his duty ; but he has kept 
himself in the background, and merit which does 
not brag of itself is rarely discovered. I think, 
however, that a protection which would advance 
his interests without demanding too many efforts 
on his part, would be very agreeable to him, and 
if Madame la Duchesse du Maine will allow me to 
put the matter before him, I have no doubt, from 
what I hear, that the proposition will be received 
favourably, and that it will be a most suitable 
estabUshment for you. He is a man of good 
family, who has lived very little in society and has 
not adopted its vices. He possesses, two miles 
out of Paris, a small property which he manages 
himself; this, added to what the protection of 
Monsieur le Due du Maine will do for him, will 
secure ample comfort for both of you." 



gl8 AS A MATRIMONIAL AGENT 

This well-modulated speech, gliding so pleasantly 
from the tones of wordliness to those of the pipes 
of Pan, fired Mademoiselle Delaunay's imagina- 
tion. It suggested to her the picture of an idyllic 
life, in which each feature assumed a sweet and 
naive charm. " I was then in the habit of taking 
milk," she says, " and for the time being nothing 
seemed as likely to afford satisfaction as to have 
cows at hand." 

Some minor points had to be settled before 
the chief conditions of the agreement could be 
considered. The excellent daughters had to be 
pacified by the assurance that their prospective 
stepmother was not plotting to wrest from 
their hands the sceptre of housekeeping or the 
authority in the poultry-yard. Once this was 
safely accomplished, it was possible to pass on 
to more important things. Monsieur de Staal, the 
Swiss lieutenant in question, stated as his chief 
condition that he should be made captain of his 
regiment after the death of the present occupant 
of that post, who was in a very precarious state 
of health. He proposed that the marriage should 
be concluded as soon as he should have been given 
some security that this request would be granted. 
A demand so reasonable met with more opposition 
than might have been expected, and Madame du 
Maine's difficulties on this occasion cannot fail to 
enlist our sympathies for her impatience at her 



AS A MATRIMONIAL AGENT 219 

husband's dilatory methods. Manoeuvres and 
counter-manoeuvres occupied a considerable time, 
and the two candidates had not met yet! But 
the Due du Maine, being at last satisfactorily tied 
down to his promise, a meeting was arranged at 
Madame de Sully's house, followed soon after by 
a dinner at Monsieur de Staal's country place. 

" The house, the repast, the company, every- 
thing suggested the simplicity of the golden age," 
exclaims Mademoiselle Delaunay. " I found a 
small house, bright and clean, with white-washed 
walls ; the absence of much furniture seemed 
rather an adornment, although later on I did not 
so much appreciate that style of house decoration. 
Fowls from the poultry-yard, meat from the flocks, 
and fruit from the orchard covered the table, as 
happened in the time when Jupiter, the hospit- 
able, was revered. Our young hostesses had pre- 
pared most of the dishes themselves, and regaled 
us with cakes and cheese made and served by 
their own hands. I looked on with pleasure at 
this way of living, which is in accordance with 
Nature, and has become so foreign to our tastes, 
and I believed that it would suit me. I felt 
well satisfied with the master of the house, with 
his bearing, and a certain unstudied courtesy which 
comes from the heart and denotes a kindly and 
benevolent nature. ... I found, in fact, that 
such was his character. . . . We had, after dinner 
a conversation in which we discussed the affair in 
question. Monsieur de Staal expressed his great 



220 AS A MATRIMONIAL AGENT 

wish to see it concluded, but remained firm never- 
theless in his intention not to come to a final 
agreement until he should have been assured of 
his promotion. I approved this wise precaution, 
and we separated satisfied with one another. 
When I had got into my carriage, he deposited 
at my feet a small lamb, the fattest of the flock, 
which he begged me to accept. This pastoral 
gallantry seemed to me in perfect keeping with 
all the rest." 

An introduction of so entirely satisfactory a 
character ought to have hastened the conclusion, 
but Monsieur du Maine, on whom it depended, 
never hurried. Meanwhile time slipped, the 
tender colours of the idyll were fading one by 
one in Mademoiselle Delaunay's memory, and 
when Madame du Maine sent for her unex- 
pectedly one day to tell her that Monsieur de 
Staal had received his nomination, and that all 
was settled, she was filled with dismay. That 
which had seemed pleasant at a distance changed 
its aspect as it drew near. " I was astonished," 
she says, " at my past blindness, and yet felt the 
impossibility of drawing back, after the steps which 
had been taken. I fell into a kind of stupor." A 
severe illness gave her for a time some hope of 
escape, but she was restored to health in spite of 
her wishes, and in vain did she entreat the 
Duchesse to intervene. Madame du Maine hardly 



MARRIED 221 

listened, and her indignant attitude later on towards 
any outside claims on Mademoiselle Delaunay's 
time shows that she never deigned to remember 
"either the representations made to her or the 
encouragement she had then given to the pro- 
posed division of duties." 

The marriage contract was signed ; the Due 
du Maine granted the bride a pension for life; 
Madame du Maine provided a trousseau. 

" The victim," say the Memoirs, " bound and 
garlanded, was sadly led to the altar by Madame 
de Chambonas, lady-in-waiting to Madame la 
Duchesse du Maine, and then taken back to 
Her Serene Highness ; she received and embraced 
me with great transports of joy. I then went 
on to Monsieur le Due du Maine to whom I 
quoted the words of the psalm : ' Suscitans a 
terra inopem, etc. . . .' I might add besides, I 
said : ' qui habitare facit sterilem in domo. . . .' " 

After the ceremony was over, a small wedding 
party got into a coach to accompany the new 
bride to Gennevilliers, her husband's country 
house. Alas ! the little white house worthy once 
of the inscription " Parva domus, magna quies," 
and which before had been wreathed in smiles, 
was now all frowns. 

"My step-daughters," says the bride, "had 
apparently flattered themselves that the affair would 
not be concluded ; they were angry at my arrival and 



222 AS A MATRIMONIAL AGENT 

disappeared instead of coming to meet me. They 
had not consented to be present at the ceremony, a 
fact which had already made me understand how 
ill-disposed they were towards me. After many 
exhortations the eldest was at last prevailed upon 
to show herself; she came with a rather bad grace, 
but I pretended not to notice this, and by many 
advances I tried to overcome her temper which 
mended a little at last. The youngest daughter 
appeared towards the end of the dinner with a few 
unconvincing excuses for not having come sooner, 
and finally everything assumed a decent, though not 
very enchanting, appearance. Monsieur de Staal was 
grieved at this disagreeable reception. I could feel 
nothing but surprise at being married at all, and 
there was in the air a feeling of discomfort which 
by degrees invaded the whole company." 

The day after this pleasant initiation, the bride 
was found sobbing in her room by the very friend 
who had brought about the marriage, and after the 
departure of her guests she felt utterly forsaken 
and a stranger in a house which she should have 
considered her own. " Monsieur de Staal," she 
owns, "did all he could to make me happy, but 
my first impression could not easily be dispelled." 

Her stay at Gennevilliers was necessarily a 
short one ; after a few days she and her husband 
returned to Sceaux to take up their duties there. 
Some feeling of elation might have been expected 
from Madame de Staal on entering upon equal 



THE NEW ESTATE 223 

terms at last the social sphere to which her 

education and her tastes entitled her, but her 

new advantages are by no means painted by her 
in glowing colours. 

" Madame du Maine showed much pleasure in 
meeting me again under my new garb ; I enjoyed 
forthwith all the privileges of the ladies in her house- 
hold — admission to her table, to her carriage. But 
I noticed on future occasions the repugnance she 
felt in being seen with me in the broad daylight of 
publicity. When the King held the review of the 
Swiss guards, Monsieur le Due du Maine told her 
that she ought certainly to go to it, and to allow me 
to see this spectacle. She went and made me go 
with Madame de Surl ... in another carriage . . . 
not in hers, in which she took Madame de 
Bess . . . better known at Court. From this 1 
concluded that the sacrament of marriage does 
not wipe out les taches originelles like the 
sacrament of baptism." 

Other discoveries awaited her: Monsieur de 
Staal went to spend Lent at his country house, 
and sent his wife word that he was to start on 
a campaign directly after Easter. He therefore 
begged her to spend the Easter week with him 
at Gennevilliers. 

" I put the proposal before Madame du Maine," 
said Madame de Staal ; " she listened to it with 
astonishment and indignation, and not satisfied 
with an absolute refusal to grant my wishes, she 



224 AS A MATRIMONIAL AGENT 

bitterly complained of my request, and accused 
me of the blackest ingratitude and of the most 
iniquitous procedures, just as if I had entirely 
failed in my duty to her in wishing to show some 
dutifulness to the husband whom she had given 
me. I tried in vain to recall to her the previous 
discussions which I had had with her on that very 
subject : everything had been forgotten and was 
flatly denied ; I then saw that I had only fastened 
more securely the chains which I had tried to 
loosen." 



CHAPTER XIX 

THE LATER COURT OF SCEAUX 

With the words just quoted the Memoirs end ; 

of the twenty years and more which were still 

before her, Madame de Staal Delaunay has 

recorded nothing, and there could be no stronger 

testimony to the truth of the feeling she expressed 

as she closed her diary for ever. With her own 

hands she had definitely fastened the chains, she 

had closed the gates which lead to the wide 

avenues of possibilities, and she saw before her 

the path of dead certainty marked out to its 

hopeless end. Of her dispirited walk down that 

dull path, what should she record, and why 

reiterate vain regrets ? 

And so silence reigns more or less over this 

last part of her life ; of her correspondence during 

these years very little remains. The two men 

who had occupied a supreme place in her 

thoughts are dead : the Marquis de Silly will 

never again exact in his lordly fashion those 

epistolary communications so charming that they 

held his mind in bondage, though his heart was 

225 p 



S26 THE LATER COURT OF SCEAUX 

unaffected ; the Chevalier de Menil, passing from 
her through the gates of treachery, is dead to 
her. The Abbe de Chauheu, who had once 
counted as lost a day in which he had not found 
the means to please her, had at last reached 
the very limit of old age and life without ever 
being conscious of approaching it. No one 
remained who mattered vitally to Madame de 
Staal, except the confidente and kindred spirit 
of her later years — the Marquise du DefFand. 
Here and there only, in letters written to her, 
she throws off her load of silence and allows 
herself the luxury of small outbursts. " O ma 
reine ! " she exclaims, " que les hommes et leurs 
femelles sont de plaisants animaux. Je ris de 
leurs manoeuvres le jour que j'ai bien dormi : 
quand le sommeil me manque, je suis prete a les 
assommer," and she adds philosophically, "this 
shows that I myself have not strayed very far 
from the species." 

The "species," she understood them and 
judged them with merciless lucidity ; a most 
striking example of it is the portrait of Madame 
du Maine which Madame du Deffand once 
found in a letter addressed to her by Madame 
de Staal within the last ten years of their corre- 
spondence. The tone of detached criticism, of 
coldly meted out justice, which runs all through 
the description of a woman at whose hands she 



J 



STILL A CHILD 227 

had suffered, and suffered very poignantly, makes 
it interesting enough to be quoted in full. 

"Madame la Duchesse du Maine has arrived 
at the age of sixty without having been taught 
anything by her experiences ; she is a child 
possessed of much wit, she has the unpleasing 
and the pleasing qualities of a child. Being 
inquisitive and credulous, she has wished to be 
acquainted with all the different branches of 
knowledge, but has been satisfied with super- 
ficialities. The decisions of those who have 
brought her up have become the principles and 
rules of her life, she has never doubted their 
excellence, she has submitted to them once for 
all. Her provision of ideas is made ; she would 
reject the most clearly demonstrated truths and 
the best arguments, if they went against the 
first impressions which she has received. To 
examine into anything is impossible to her light- 
mindedness, and a state of doubt is unbearable 
to her frailty. Her catechism and Descartes's 
philosophy are two systems in which she has 
equal faith. 

" Her opinion of herself, however excessive, has 
only gone as far as it has been made to go. The 
idea she has of her value is a prejudice which 
has been given to her, like the rest of her opinions. 
She believes in herself as she believes in God 
and in Descartes, without examination, without 
discussion. Her mirror has not been able to 
cast any doubt on the charms of her physiognomy. 
The testimony of her eyes is more suspicious to 



THE LATER COURT OF SCEAUX 

her than the judgment of those who have decided 
that she is both beautiful and well-made. Her 
vanity is of a singular kind, yet it seems less 
shocking because it is not reasoned out, although 
it is all the more absurd for it. 

" To have intercourse with her is slavery ; 
her tyranny is quite unconcealed ; she does not 
deign to colour it with the semblance of friend- 
ship. She says ingenuously that she is unlucky 
enough not to be able to do without people for 
whom she does not care at all : and, indeed, she 
proves it. One sees her hear with perfect 
indifference the death of those who made her 
shed tears if they were a quarter of an hour late 
for a game or a walk. 

" One cannot have any illusions about her : 
her frankness, or, to put it more accurately, the 
little consideration she has for anybody, causes 
her never to dissimulate any of her caprices. 
She suggested to a great wit of her times the 
saying that 'princes are in a moral sphere what 
monsters are in physical life ; in them one can 
perceive with perfect clearness most of those vices 
which are imperceptible in other men.' 

" Her temper is impetuous and uneven, she 
passes from anger to despair, to indignation, to 
serenity, twenty times within a quarter of an 
hour. She often rouses herself from the very 
depths of sadness to break into a sudden gaiety 
which is most winning. Her wit is fine, quick 
and light ; her memory is prodigious ; she speaks 
with eloquence, but with too much vehemence 
and prolixity. One can have no conversation 



MANKIND'S EPITOME 229 

with her ; she does not care to be understood, it 
is enough for her to be listened to ; consequently, 
she has no knowledge whatsoever of the mind, 
the talents, the defects, and the ridicules of those 
who surround her. Some one has said of her: 
' qu'elle n'etait point sortie de chez elle, et qu'elle 
n'avait pas meme mis le nez a la fenetre.' 

" She has spent her hfe in seeking pleasures 
and amusements of all kinds ; she spares neither 
care nor expense to make her court agreeable 
and brilliant. In one word, Madame la Duchesse 
du Maine is so constituted that one can say of 
her a great deal that is good and a great deal that 
is bad, without offending truth. She is haughty 
without being proud, is a spendthrift without 
being generous, she has religion but no piety, a 
great opinion of herself without contempt for others, 
much information without real knowledge, and all 
the show of friendship without the feeling of it. ..." 

What could be the life of those dependent 
on Madame du Maine, but a meaningless round 
of activities from which the healthy element of 
individual promptings, the tonic flavour of 
individual impulses must always and necessarily 
be absent ! All the weariness of it groans in 
the following passages : — 

"We are for ever saying and doing the same 
things, we walk, we remark on the wind, on 
cards, on gains and losses, on the measures taken 
to keep the doors closed, whatever the heat may 

p2 



230 THE LATER COURT OF SCEAUX 

be, and on the subsequent despair of those whom 
we call the stifled ones — among whom I figure." 

Under such circumstances even the discomforts 
of a transitory summer residence — such as SoreP 
from which some letters are dated — may be greeted 
as a godsend, for they create at least a little stir 
in the torpid waters, they awaken desire for change, 
and is it not a pleasure to feel the stirring of a 
desire ? 

" Sorel is good, inasmuch as it makes you 
wish for Anet," writes Madame de Staal, "and 
so I always come here with great pleasure. 
This is one of the pretty places in this world, 
nothing could be brighter or more cheerful than 
its general aspect, but nothing could be as 
morose and cheerless as its inhabitants. The 
chatelaine herself is reduced to wishing for some 
annoyance, some teasing element which might 
rouse the company. To-night we are going 
to have un grand souper maigre that won't be 
more entertaining than the rest ! In short, during 
this whole fortnight since we have been here, 
nothing has happened, either tragic or comic, that 
I could have written to you. I had thought of 
reporting to you Monsieur Dumont's sore throat, 
as the most remarkable event of these days. He 
wanted to be bled. Her Serene Highness would 
not allow it. The tears of his wife, the emotion 
of the assembly, the request to call in Monsieur 
Bouteille, refused peremptorily, the manoeuvres 

^ One of the summer residences of Madame du Maine. 



WEARY GLORY 231 

to smuggle in Monsieur Andre instead, reduced to 
naught, the complaints on the one hand, the 
dissertations on the other, ' tout cela s'est 
merveilleusement etendu dans le vide.' Now 
Dumont has recovered, in spite of himself, without 
taking any remedy, and he feels quite humiliated 
by it. . . . Good-bye, my queen ; if I had anything 
worth writing, I would sacrifice my dinner to you, 
but that which comes into my mind is more 
tasteless even than what I am going to eat. I 
lose all my thinking power when I have no 
time of my own." 

Though weariness moans in her heart, out- 
wardly she bears herself bravely ; graceful and 
witty, she gives of the bountiful stores of her 
mind, without expecting too much in return, and, 
as years go by, her name is found more and more 
frequently coupled with that of Madame du 
Deffand, whenever the attractions of Sceaux are 
discussed. These two women, so subtly alike 
in temperament, made, it is said, the glory of 
the second period of Sceaux, more than the 
Duchesse de Luynes, than the Marquise de 
Lambert in spite of the fame of her Paris 
salon, more than the Duchesse d'Estrees whose 
inexhaustible zest for activities was only equalled 
by that of Madame du Maine herself. 

This princess, in spite of the prosaic claims 
of middle age and embonpoint, still looked upon 
herself as an impersonation of Venus and Astarte, 



232 THE LATER COURT OF SCEAUX 

and claimed worship even from sceptics whose 
eyes failed to see this. President Renault him- 
self, ami attitre of Madame du Deifand, her 
equal in terseness of speech and biting sarcasm, 
has to become lyrical like the rest — and how he 
bewails it later on! 

"I spent more than twenty years at Sceaux, 
and may God forgive me," he exclaims, "for all 
the tasteless compliments with which I inflated 
mediocre verses. If by some piece of ill-luck these 
wretched things were to survive me, they would 
lead people to believe that the Duchesse du Maine 
was beauty personified, that she was Venus floating 
upon the waters — one would mistake for physical 
charm that which was purely the charm of con- 
versation. Madame la Duchesse du Maine," he 
adds, " was the oracle of her small court. It would 
be impossible to be more witty, more eloquent, 
more playful, more truly courteous than she was, 
but, at the same time, one could not be more 
unfair, more self-seeking, or more tyrannical." 

All those around her had to humour her 
caprices, to bear with her tyrannies, to follow 
her breathlessly in a senseless round of activities 
which had lost their taste even for her, but which 
had become necessities of her life. 

" . . . I am very sorry that you should be without 
diversions," Madame de Staal writes to Madame 
du Defland, " they are a medicine which is indis- 



FEAR OF THUNDER 283 

pensible to health — our Princess, at least, has no 
doubt of that, for although she is ill, she goes night 
and day without a pause. . . . These last few 
days we were steeped in diversions, now we are 
steeped in rain. . . . Moreover, our Princess has 
lately caught a feverish chill, in spite of which 
and in defiance of the diabolical weather our 
daily walks still continue. It would seem that 
Providence fashions for the use of princes special 
bodies made to resist the wear and tear of their 
caprices, otherwise they could never reach a 
man's estate." 

One thing only, it seems, daunted the weather- 
proof energy of the Duchesse : a thunderstorm ; it 
terrified her, it reduced her and her mental 
capacities to their very lowest depth. 

" I read your letter to Her Serene Highness two 
days ago, my queen," reports Madame de Staal to 
her favourite correspondent. " She was in a state 
of great terror at the thunder, a circumstance 
which did not help your civilities to appear to 
their best advantage. Another time I shall take 
care not to expose you to a thunderstorm ! " 

Indoor diversions rivalled outdoor pursuits : 
the stage at Sceaux was seldom empty of actors, 
and Madame du Maine's zeal for learning the 
longest parts had not abated; but it happened 
sometimes, in that second period of her reign, 
that an overbearing rival dared to snatch from 



234 THE LATER COURT OF SCEAUX 

her the sceptre of supremacy, Madame du 
Chatelet, for instance, who from time to time 
made tempestuous descents upon Sceaux with 
" her " Voltaire, her scientific books, her manu- 
scripts, and her demands which set the whole 
household agog. Madame de Staal writes to 
Madame du DefFand, who had announced her 
arrival shortly after Madame du Chatelet 's 
departure. 

" At any rate the apartment reserved for you 
here is a comfortable one ; it is that of which 
Madame du Chatelet had taken possession, after a 
discriminate inspection of the whole house ! You 
will find in it, perhaps, a little less furniture than 
she had put in ; for she had plundered all the 
apartments she had had before, in order to garnish 
this last one. Six or seven tables, which had 
been missing, were found there ; she needs them 
in all sizes — very wide ones to spread out her 
papers, heavy ones to carry her travelling cases, 
light ones for her knick-knacks, ribbons, and 
jewels; and yet this fine systematic arrangement 
did not save her from an accident such as happened 
to Philip II. when, after he had spent the whole 
night in writing, some one upset a bottle of 
ink all over his despatches. The lady did not 
pride herself upon imitating the prince's modera- 
tion in this case — but then he had only written 
upon affairs of State, whereas, in her case, what 
had been smudged was algebra, a thing much 
harder to clear up ! . . , " 



VOLTAIRE 285 

The arrival of this female pedant is not described 
in enthusiastic terms. 

^'Anet/ 15th August 1747. 

" . . . . Madame du Chatelet and Voltaire, who 
were to arrive to-day and who lately had been more 
or less lost sight of, appeared yesterday about 
midnight, like two ghosts, carrying with them an 
atmosphere as of embalmed mummies who have 
just risen from their tombs. We had just got up 
from supper, however they were famished ghosts 
and had to have something to eat ; more than 
that, they had to have beds, which, of course, 
were not ready. The concierge, who had gone to 
bed, got up in great haste. Gaya,^ who had offered 
to leave his apartment if it should be wanted, was 
obliged to give it up now ; he moved out with as 
much precipitation and displeasure as an army 
overtaken in camp and obliged to leave part of its 
baggage in the hands of the enemy. Voltaire was 
very comfortable in Gaya's apartment, a circum- 
stance which did not comfort Gaya in the very 
least. As to the lady she declared that her bed 
had been made very badly, and she had to be 
moved to-day. You will please note that she had 
made that bed herself ! " 

Madame du Chatelet's recriminations at all 
times were proverbial. Madame de Staal, who 
evidently felt nothing but antipathy for a mind all 
mathematics and a soul all vanity, writes a little 

J One of the summer residences of Madame du Maine, 
^ An officer of Monsieur du Maine's suite. 



236 THE LATER COURT OF SCEAUX 

later : " La du Chatelet has discovered a deviation 
of 16 degrees by 8 in her mattresses ; this, I should 
think, has bruised her accurate mind more than her 
body which could hardly be called delicate." 

On the 20th of August, five days after Madame 
du Chatelet 's arrival, a new letter of Madame de 
Staal shows that the migrations of the troublesome 
guest are not ended yet. 

" Madame du Chatelet has since yesterday 
completed her third installation ; she could not 
any longer bear the one she had chosen before ; 
it was noisy, it smoked without having any fire ! 
(smoke without fire seems to me to be exactly 
her emblem). Noise, as she explained, does not 
incommode her at night, but in the day time when 
the fervour of her work is at its height, then it 
disturbs her thoughts. She is at present making a 
review of her ' Principles ' — this is a practice which 
she repeats every year, for fear they should escape 
from her and run so far that not one of them could 
be got back again ! I rather think that her mind 
is to her principles more of a prison than a natural 
home ; there is then every reason to keep a careful 
watch over them." 

A very biting piece of sarcasm — too biting 
perhaps, but it is quite evident from the testimonies 
of contemporaries that Madame du Chatelet never 
enlisted many sympathies. Madame du Maine's 
circle shared the common opinion. " They have made 
themselves generally detested here," Madame de 



MADAME DU CHATELET 337 

Staal writes a few days after the departure of 
Voltaire and his Egeria, "by showing neither 
pohteness nor consideration to any one." It seems 
that these two guests who were so careless in the 
matter of opportune arrival, so careful in the matter 
of their own comfort, made further breaches in 
the etiquette of hospitality by remaining all day 
long secluded in their apartments. 

" Our ghosts do not show themselves in the 
daytime," we hear from Madame de Staal, "last 
night they appeared at 10 o'clock, I don't think 
that we shall see them much earlier to-day ; the 
one is busy describing valorous deeds, the other is 
writing comments on Newton — ce sont bien des 
non-valeurs dans une societe ou leurs doctes 
ecrits ne sont d'aucun rapport." 

To the very end Madame du Chatelet seems to 
have kept to her systematic selfishness, though 
Voltaire, who evidently felt the criticism in the 
air, made some effort at propitiation. 

" She prefers," we hear, " the charm of her own 
occupations to any amusements and she persists 
in not showing herself till nightfall ; Voltaire, how- 
ever, has composed some flattering verses which have 
dispelled just a little the bad impression made by 
their unusual behaviour." 

The only occasion on which they redeemed 
their reputation was on the eve of their departure. 



238 THE LATER COURT OF SCEAUX 

One of Voltaire's comedies, Le Comte de Bour- 
soiifle, was acted, and Madame du Chatelet, though 
neither her physique nor her costume were suited to 
her part, acted with such consummate excellence 
that she won the complete appreciation, even of 
Madame de Staal. " She acted with such perfec- 
tion the extravagance of her part that it afforded 
me the very greatest pleasure." A few notes of 
criticism, however, are scattered amongst the praises 
of this performance, to which many guests had been 
bidden, and also a well-known actress, Madame 
Dufour, who was to have the pleasure of acting 
the secondary part of housekeeper to Madame 
du Chatelet, in her chief part of Mademoiselle de 
la Cochonniere. 

" It is Venture ^ who is acting the Comte de 
Boursoufle — his will not be a speaking likeness, nor 
will this be the case with Madame du Chatelet 
acting Mademoiselle de la Cochonniere, who ought 
to be short and fat. ..." 

And a little later the correspondence records : — 

" All went off fairly well, and one can say that 
this farce was well acted ; the author ennobled it by 
a prologue in which he acted himself, and very well, 
too, with our Dufour, who but for that glorious 
role could not have digested being Madame Barbe ; 
she could not consent to the simplicity of dress 

■^ A rather sorry-looking secretary of Monsieur du Maine. 



DEPARTURE OF VOLTAIRE 239 

required by her role, neither could the principal 
actress who, putting the interests of vanity above 
those of the play, appeared on the stage in all the 
elegance and brilliancy of a court lady; she and 
Voltaire fell out over this point, but she is the 
sovereign and he is the slave. ..." 

Voltaire and Madame du Chatelet, by their real 
literary excellence, and, perhaps, who knows to 
what degree, by the decided independence of their 
attitude, had set a current of real enjoyment flow- 
ing through the dormant waters of Anet ; and from 
the lips of Madame de Staal, who was ever ready 
to be conquered by excellence of any kind, there 
falls a spontaneous confession of dependence upon 
these two : " I am very sorry that they are going," 
she owns, adding however, " but I am wearied out 
with her numerous and diverse caprices, all of 
which she expects me to fulfil." The post which 
arrived the day after the departure of these exact- 
ing guests can only have strengthened Madame de 
Staal in her reservations. She describes this to 
Madame du DefFand with her usual verve : — 

"The day after their departure, I received a 
letter of four pages and added to that, in the same 
packet, a note which announces a great desarroi, 
Monsieur de Voltaire has mislaid his comedy, for- 
gotten to take with him the actors' parts written out 
separately, and lost the prologue. I am enjoined 
to find everything, to send on the prologue at the 



240 THE LATER COURT OF SCEAUX 

very earliest opportunity, not by post, because 
some one would be sure to copy it. I am to keep the 
separate parts for fear of the same danger and to 
lock up the comedy under a hundred locks and 
keys ! I should have considered a latch quite 
sufficient for the safe keeping of such a treasure ! 
I have, however, duly executed all the orders I 
have received." 

Not until Madame du Chatelet brought him 
in her train had Voltaire appeared at Sceaux, 
and yet, as a young man, when he relied upon 
his wit alone to conquer a place in society, he 
had seemed especially fitted to figure among the 
intellectual purveyors of Madame du Maine. 
About 1732 again, Madame du DefFand had 
tried to attach him in some capacity to the 
household of the Duchesse, and although the post 
she offered was not the most desirable, she had 
pressed him very much to accept it. He had 
refused ; his independent spirit was full grown 
at that time and chafed at the restraint which 
was awaiting him ; his answer, with its little 
venomous dart at the end, is very characteristic : — 

" You have proposed to me, Madame," he wrote, 
"the dignity of equerry in Madame la Duchesse 
du Maine's household, and as 1 did not feel 
equal to that task, I have been obliged to wait 
for another opportunity to pay my court to you. 
I hear that besides that post of equerry there is 



OPPOSING EGOISTS 241 

also another one vacant, for a reader ; but I am 
quite convinced that this is not a sinecure with 
Madame du Maine, as it is with the King.''' 

Voltaire knew the exactions of the service at 
the court of Sceaux, and he who at Madame de 
Chatelet's house was granted, as a matter of 
course, the undisturbed enjoyment of his own 
private apartments, his own gold plate, his own 
moods, and his own tempers had naturally been 
unwilling to bend his neck under the yoke and 
to file into place in the well-disciplined ranks of 
the Sceaux courtiers. Disciplined they were 
indeed, and from a hard necessity, meek of spirit, 
for Madame du Maine ignored other claims than 
her own. She expected the best of all things 
to fall quite naturally to the best of all beings 
— herself ; that division of gifts seemed to her the 
only possible one. 



CHAPTER XX 

THE CLOSE OF AN EVENTFUL LIFE 

If there is one human need which was bound to 
starve most cruelly in the atmosphere of Sceaux, 
it is the need of friendship. Madame de Staal 
longed for friendship ; the very frequency of the 
letters written by her to Madame du Deffand 
shows how much she yearned for it. All the 
rather cold and sometimes cynical philosophy 
which disillusioning circumstances had built up 
in her, crumbles down when true devotion is 
roused. The same absolute unselfishness which 
had once marked her relations with the Marquis 
de Silly again characterises her intercourse with 
Madame du DefFand. Where she loves whole- 
heartedly, she sacrifices herself as whole-heartedly. 
In her solitude of mind and heart, her friend's 
letters are the only real joy of her days ; yet 
she constantly puts a curb upon her desire for 
them. 

For some reason still unknown, the letters of 

the year 1747 are the only ones which have been 

242 



A COMFORTING FRIENDSHIP 243 

preserved ; at that time the friendship between 
the two women is of long date already, but 
there has been no blunting of the keen sensi- 
bilities. The letters of Madame de Staal follow 
close upon each other, often at a distance of 
two or three days only, and when the answers 
do not arrive quickly, impatience calls out 
insistently. Yet she chides herself for this, and 
she begs Madame du DeiFand to take no notice of 
her demands. " I beg you," she writes, " to have no 
regard for my complaints, and to give way to laziness 
by all means, when it overtakes you ; I love your 
letters passionately, but writing them shall not 
cost you anything," and later on : " Are you going 
to Champs, ma reinel Perhaps you are there 
already. I know nothing about you, but pro- 
vided you are well, 1 approve of everything." 
And another time : " I will not buy my pleasure 
at the expense of your trouble, not even the 
pleasure of hearing from you. ..." 

More precious still than her letters were the 
visits which Madame du DelFand paid from time 
to time to the Duchesse du Maine. These seem 
to have been scarce in that year 1747, and from 
the cautionary measures advised in the letters 
stands out quite clearly the fact which was 
to be expected — that intercourse between the 
independent minded Marquise du Deffand and 
the tyrannical Duchesse du Maine was not a 



244 THE CLOSE OF AN EVENTFUL LIFE 

smoothly working function. Though Madame de 
Staal longs for the tonic presence of her friend, 
her one wish is to spare her annoyance, even if 
it must mean the giving up of a visit long 
planned. There is in the letters a good deal 
of discussion about the comparative merits of 
le grand chateau and le petit chateau \ these 
were the two residences of Madame du Maine 
at Sceaux. In the main building, the grand 
chateau, resided the Duchesse herself, and there 
she assigned apartments to those of her guests 
whom she wished to honour specially. Madame 
de Staal, as one of the chief ladies-in-waiting, had 
her rooms there too, and would naturally have 
preferred to have Madame du DefFand under the 
same roof. An apartment in the grand chateau 
would, as a matter of course, have fallen to the 
lot of the influential Marquise, but — there were 
conditions attached to this honour which she was 
at times utterly incapable of fulfilling. . . . There 
was something in the atmosphere of Sceaux which 
would suddenly plunge her into uncontrollable fits 
of boredom ; on those occasions she would unex- 
pectedly be called back to Paris on matters of the 
extremest urgency. Now levity in the treatment 
of the grand chateau was the unpardonable sin, 
and the essence of the crime, it will be noticed, 
was not wilfully to forego the society of Madame 
du Maine, but to leave empty one of those apart- 



MADAME DU DEFFAND 245 

ments which must ever be filled, lest the tide of 
popularity should be thought to wane! 

Madame du Deffand's presence is desired at 
Sceaux for the sake of her prestige, but her 
temperament evidently rouses hesitations. 

" I suspect," Madame de Staal writes, *' that the 
fear of having fewer guests by giving you more 
rooms is very detrimental to the affection ' a certain 
person ' has for you, for ' our ' dominant passion is 
the multitude ; this taste increases and grows 
stronger as 'one' finds less resources in * oneself.' . . . 
Whilst deeming you perhaps less amiable than of 
old, one does not any the less desire to have you 
here. The wish to be surrounded increases from 
day to day, and I foresee that if you keep an 
apartment without occupying it, it will provoke 
great regret for what will be missed in con- 
sequence, whatever it may be." 

A little later, as Madame du DefFand has not 
yet given any certitude of her arrival at Sceaux, 
the wish to have her there increases in proportion. 
Madame de Staal has warmer messages to send, 
but knowing her friend's impulsive ways, she 
advises the choice of le petit chateau, for although 
it was damp and uncomfortable, to vacate an 
apartment there unexpectedly was counted a sin 
of lesser proportions. 

"Madame la Duchesse du Maine sends you 
the assurances that she loves you as much as ever, 

Q 2 



246 THE CLOSE OF AN EVENTFUL LIFE 

and will give you any apartment you may wish 
to have, as I have written to you already. To 
that I add, between ourselves, that if while at the 
grand chateau you only appear in the evenings, 
or if you go to Paris frequently, you will encounter 
great disfavour, even if it were only on account 
of the bad example you will set, by following 
your own wishes in these precincts. . . . Therefore, 
I advise you, ma reine, in spite of the convenience 
it would be to me, not to accept that apartment, 
unless you wish to accept with it more responsi- 
bilities than you take in the other. ... If you 
cannot be here much, ma 7^eine, try to be satisfied 
with the petit chateau^ in order to avoid talk 
and perhaps complaints which would be unpleasant 
to you. Let us strive to let nothing separate us 
more than we are already ! If you make up your 
mind to take up your abode in that cold and 
damp place, give orders that a good fire should 
be lighted in it, several days before your arrivaL" 

Just before Madame du DefFand is to arrive 
at Sceaux, something happens which threatens to 
break off all relations between her and Madame 
du Maine. She has been to see the Duchesse de 
Modene, daughter of the Regent, a fascinating 
brilliant woman of whose rivalry Madame du 
Maine has always been passionately jealous. 
Such a defection is unpardonable ! Madame de 
Staal warns her of the effect of this action and 
beseeches her to bridge over difficulties, if only 
for once, as she herself is strongly suspected of 



MAN'S INGRATITUDE 247 

admiration for the obnoxious rival, and unless 
Madame du Maine's anger is appeased, it will 
break up everything, irrespective of future regrets. 

"Nothing, ma reine, could equal the surprise 
and the grief ' a certain person ' feels at hearing that 
you have been to see Madame la Duchesse de 
Modene ; the most passionate and jealous lover 
would bear suspicious dealings on the part of his 
loved one with more equanimity than 'one' endures 
these from you." 

And then she quotes more or less textually 
Madame du Maine's oracular denunciations of the 
world for treating with such base ingratitude the 
noble and unique gift of her favours. 

" You go and sacrifice yourself, you give up 
everything . . . and this is in reserve for you . . . 
one is indeed a rare example of ill-luck . . . those 
torments of which one thought to be delivered 
will again befall one . . . always the same pitfalls 
... it is a most cruel fate . . . etc., etc. ! . . . I 
said all that could be said to calm her, but she 
would listen to nothing. Although I ought not 
to be capable of surprise any more, this scene has 
yet contrived to surprise me. Come, I beseech 
you, ma reine, come and prevent a catastrophe . . . 
I understand that you might be tempted to avoid 
such a thorny path, but remember that if you 
decide to do it, all will fall upon me whom you 
would leave utterly forsaken. ' A certain person ' is 
akeady very ill-disposed towards me, and T entreat 
you, considering the circumstances, to lend yourself 



248 THE CLOSE OF AN EVENTFUL LIFE 

to what is necessary in order to adjust matters. If, 
later on, you cannot stand it any longer (for I 
know how difficult it is) you will loosen the ties 
gently, without causing a definite rupture ; I 
shall never ask of your friendship that your life 
should be made thorny and difficult ; it is enough 
that mine should be so. If you shared my 
troubles, far from being relieved they would be 
doubled. We are leaving here to-morrow, and we 
shall arrive at Sceaux on Thursday ; as I have told 
you I desire passionately to find you there on our 
arrival. I have never had so great a need of you, 
my queen." 

Friendship, aifection is for Madame de Staal 
the great softener of hard edges ; under its 
influence she grows diffident about herself, she 
glows with a desire for perfection, she, to whom 
an exceptionally clear vision has given such self- 
assurance, a conviction that a very moderate state 
of grace is all one can expect of oneself and of 
others ! 

" It would be impossible to be more touched 
by your friendship than I am, ma reined' she 
writes, "but I am a little worried about the too 
good opinion you have of me; it makes me feel 
that I may be false, for if you do not see my 
faults, I must be hiding them, and that is worse 
than possessing them." 

And going back to the same subject, another time : 
*' I see that it is not I whom you love, but 



PATIENCE AND WEARINESS 249 

an ideal of your own creation, which you have 
made worthy of you, and which has all too little 
resemblance to the frail creature to whom you 
present it. You will, in the end, reduce me to my 
own value : I hope, however, that accustomed to 
love me and touched by my feeling for you, 
you will not love me any the less for your 
discovery." 

Her sincerity prompts her to give instances of 
her unworthiness, and one of these is so touching 
in its pathetic grace, so illustrative at the same 
time of the atmosphere of Sceaux, that it is worth 
being quoted in full. Madame du Maine was 
suffering from an attack of rheumatism to which she 
sacrificed many of her attendants, but none of her 
diversions. Two nights running IMadame de Staal 
had been called to keep the wakeful Duchesse 
company, and her weariness was so great that 
for a moment she so far forgot herself that she 
dared to show it. She bemoans the fact to 
Madame du DefFand. 

" I am far from being as perfect as you think 
me. When I was fetched the second night, I 
made a wry face, being really hardly able to drag 
myself. The next day I was reprimanded for it, 
very curtly, and in the presence of many; that 
displeased me. I had begged Monsieur de Lassay, 
who was there at the time, to lodge for me a 
modest little complaint ; he missed his opportunity, 
and I don't think he has found one since. Don't 



250 THE CLOSE OF AN EVENTFUL LIFE 

mention this to him, if you see him, for now it 
would not be of use any more." Then she adds 
philosophically : " The result of all this has been 
that I have been left to myself a good deal, and 
perhaps that a little contempt, provided I do not 
deserve it, is better than a great deal of fatigue 
which I might have had. ..." 

Next to Madame de Staal's admirable capacity 
of devotion to real friends stands her no less 
admirable quality of indifference to all friendship 
not based on congeniality of mind and feeling. 
The importance in her eyes of those friends 
who can only be made by " climbing " and used 
for "climbing" she expresses in her own ironical 
manner. " As to those (friends) who can only be 
caught by aerial flights, one will do well to feel 
resigned when one misses them, and not to spoil 
one's features for their sake." All through the 
long years which she spent with Madame du 
Maine, she never used that rare perspicacity 
which was hers, that quick amusing wit on which 
the Duchesse had learned to depend, for any 
purpose of self-advancement ; she never presumed 
on any appreciation shown to her qualities to 
make claims to any friendship. She had realised 
that Madame du Maine had none of the qualities 
which make a real friend, and she scorned a 
semblance of it. Yet, even while she thought 
herself resigned to the callous atmosphere around 



DEATH OF THE DUCHESSE D'ESTREES 251 

her, something happened in that same year 1747, 
just as the first autumn leaves were faUing from 
the trees in the beautiful park of Anet — something 
happened which made her realise with an ugly- 
shock that she had yet been dreaming dreams 
about humanity, and that reahty was more 
hopeless, by far, than she had thought. The 
Duchesse d'Estrees, closest friend of Madame du 
Maine, and the very embodiment of vitality, 
died suddenly, and Anet, shaken to its very 
foundations by this overpowering victory of Death, 
showed only one feeling after a few brief hours 
of stupor, a passionate wish to forget. 

This event is the last she has recorded ; a few 
passages in letters addressed to Madame du Deffand 
call up the melancholy episode. The first allusion 
to it is written in that slight note of mocking 
cynicism which Madame de Staal so frequently 
sounds; she does not foresee any serious conse- 
quences of the incident she relates, and her style 
follows its natural bent: 

"Yesterday, the Duchesse d'Estrdes had a 
heavy fall — being quite incapable of having a 
light one ; she declares that her head in striking 
the stairs made a noise like thunder, and she says 
that she rolled down five steps. She had herself 
bled, and went down to supper ; I suppose that she 
supped well, and that this accident will have no 
unpleasant consequences." 



252 THE CLOSE OF AN EVENTFUL LIFE 

The first consequence was an unexpected one. 
The Duchesse, deplorably headstrong as a rule, in 
a way which often caused her to fall from grace, 
went through a felicitous period of meekness and 
self - abasement which made Madame de Staal 
exclaim: **I have never seen her more easily satisfied 
or more accommodating, her rivals are getting 
thin w^ith disappointment over this happy truce ! " 

There was no need to fear Madame d'Estrees' 
ever-renewed influence over Madame du Maine 
— it was doomed even then ; a few days later she 
died suddenly, perhaps from the consequences of 
her accident. 

" This afternoon we are burying that poor 
Duchesse d'Estrees," writes Madame de Staal, 
" and then the curtain will come down, and we 
will say no more about it. . . . We have not had 
any acting, it is true, since the awful spectacle 
which we have had to witness, but I should not 
wonder if we saw Monsieur de Senetterre's farce 
acted here again, before we leave. ... It must 
be owned that this is going a little beyond human 
nature. I can imagine my own funeral, if regrets 
for me are greater, my funeral pomp will be 
greater in proportion . . . but what does it all 
matter ! " 

What does it all matter — this becomes 
more and more the keynote of Madame de Staal's 
philosophy. The vanity of things — how could 
it have been illustrated more poignantly than by 



SPREADING OF THE MIGHTY ONES 253 

Madame du Maine's desperate wooing of pleasure 
— pleasure at any cost, at any price, as a mere 
assertion of her caprices, perhaps as a flimsy 
curtain screening but imperfectly the unfaceable 
terrors of old age and death. . . . For one who 
looked on with seeing eyes at the fantasmagory 
of Sceaux, there were many curious truths to be 
discovered ; Madame du DefFand confesses that 
she, too, found in it rare good fortunes of observa- 
tion. Madame de Staal and she had, from daily 
experiences, come very much to the same con- 
clusions. One of those facts which had been 
most ruthless in the shaping of her life at Sceaux 
is expressed by Madame de Staal with a note of 
triumphant superiority although bitterness rankles 
in it still. 

"From sheer spreading of their personality," 
she writes, " the mighty ones of this earth become 
so transparent that one can see through them ; it 
is a sight which affords fine opportunities for study, 
and I know of nothing which inclines me more 
to philosophy." 

She understands that as " the mighty ones " 
feel this irrepressible need of " spreading," there 
can be but little room left for those dependent 
on them, and that the only wise course to take is 
to school oneself to indifference. " Sensitiveness," 
she says, " increases as one panders to it ; one is 



254 THE CLOSE OF AN EVENTFUL LIFE 

often unhappy only from too great a wish to be 
happy." 

Thus she expresses her renunciation which, for 

all its philosophy, still pulses with the eternal 

yearning of the human heart. How much was 

life to grant yet to her longings ? Only three 

short years were left to her as she wrote the 

words last quoted, and of these last years nothing 

is known. The letters written after 1747 seem 

to have been lost, probably there were but few of 

them : the strenuous personality which had mocked 

at fate so long, which had hoped so buoyantly 

and had grieved so passionately, was dying out 

at last in the cold shadow which " the great ones 

of this earth " spread around them. Perhaps she 

found increasing peace and serenity ; had she 

been asked to sum up these years of her life, she 

might perhaps have repeated those words which 

close one of her last letters and which seem to 

sound a defeat and yet a victory : " Since I have 

come to wish for nothing, I have felt more at 

peace than if I had everything that 1 ever wished 

to possess." 



INDEX 



Albemarle, Duchess of, 56 

Alberoni, Cardinal, 145-146 

Anjou, Duchesse d', 69 

Argenson, Marquis d', 61, 62, 130, 163- 

167 
Artagnan, Comtesse d', 56 
Austria, Emperor of, 92 

Barron, 58 

Berry, Due de, 97-98 

, Duchesse de, 156-157 

Bethune, Due de, 149 

Blois, Mademoiselle de, see Duchesse 

d 'Orleans 
Bourbon, Henri- Jules de, " Monsieur 

le Prince," 40, 49, 56, 94 
, "Monsieur le Due," 48, 117-118, 

151, 199, 202 
Bourgogne, Duchesse de, 95, 97 
Brassac, Comtesse de, 77 
Bretagne, Due de, 34, 96 
Brigaut, Abbe, 141-145 

Cellamaee, Prince, 126-128, 142 
Charolais, Comte de, 118 
Chatelet, Marquise du, 234-241 
Chaulieu, Abbe de, 113-116 
Choiseul, Duchesse de, 56 
Clermont, Mademoiselle de, 63 
Coislin, Due de, 56 
Colbert, 52 

Condg, "le Grand," 40 
Conti, Prince de, 118-201 

Dauphin, the, 92 

Dauphine, the, 29 

Delaunay, Henriette, 36, 65 

, Mademoiselle, birth and educa- 
tion, 1 - 5 ; is considered a prodigy, 
6 ; first glimpse of the world, 7-9 ; 
falls in love, 10 - 20 ; is thrown 
upon her own resources, 22 ; seeks 
her fortune in Paris, 27 ; meets 
Madame de la Ferte, 28 ; is shown 
to society at Versailles, 34 ; is taken 
to Sceaux, 57 ; enters Madame du 
Maine's service, 65 ; discomfoi'ts of 
her position, 67-74 ; resolves to put 
an end to her life, 75 ; comes into 
notice, 79 ; acts, 84 ; her portrait, 
113 ; legal researches, 120 ; inter- 



views with adventurers, 121 - 124 ; 
meetings with conspirators, 137 ; 
arrested, 149-153 ; diversions at the 
Bastille, 159 - 161 ; elusiveness, 167- 
168 ; falls in love with De M^nil, 
169-186 ; the Cellamare conspiracy, 
196 ; returns to Sceaux, 204 - 208 ; 
overtures of marriage, 211-215 ; meets 
Monsieur de Staal, 219 - 221 ; corre- 
spondence, 226-254 

Descartes, 4 

Dubois, Abb€, then Cardinal, 129-155, 
164, 197 

Duclos, 98, 131 

" Eminence grise," 22 

Enghien, Duchesse d', 56 

Estregs, Duchesse d', 206, 231, 251-252 

Eu, Comte d', 118 

F^NELON, 43 

Ferte, Duchesse de la, 27-38, 39, 53, 
58-66, 212-213 

, Mar6chal de la, 38 

Fillon, Mademoiselle, 139 
Fleury, Cardinal, 201-203 
Fontenelle, 6, 62, 78, 79, 88 

Genest, Abbe, 57 
George I. of England, 129 
Gobelin, Abbg, 46 
Grieu, Madame de, 4-7, 21 
Guise, Princesse de, 71 

Harcourt, Comte d', 56 
Hgnault, President, 57, 232 
Hombert, 96 

Infanta, Marie-Victoire of Spain, 198, 
202 

La Chaise, P^re, 22 

Lambert, Marquise de, 147, 231 

Laval, Comte de, 126, 137, 162, 165, 207 

Law, 197-198 

Len6tre, 52 

Le Tellier, P^re, 93-94 

Luynes, Duchesse de, 200, 231 

" Madame," the Eegent's mother, 151- 
152, 188-189, 191 



255 



256 



INDEX 



Maillard, Frere, 22 

Maine, Due du, character and appear- 
ance, 45 ; Madame de Maintenon's 
devotion, 46-47 ; marriage, 48-49 ; 
excluded at Sceaux, 89-90 ; declared 
legitime, 100-101 ; appalled at the 
conditions of the King's will, 108 ; 
deprived of his power, 111 ; opposes 
an alliance with England, 129 ; ex- 
cluded from the Duchesse's intrigues, 
119-148 ; dares not to be present at 
the Kng's first lit de justice, 132; 
deprived of his privileges, 134 ; ar- 
rested, 150 ; attitude in prison, 119 ; 
plans a separation from the Duchesse, 
] 91-192 ; yields to her remonstrances, 
193-194 ; dilatory ways, 219 ; grants 
Madame de Staal-Delaunay a pension, 

, Duchesse du, family and racial 

traits, 40-44 : marries the Due du 
Maine, 47-49 ; determines to shun 
Versailles, 51 ; founds her rival 
court, 52 ; her courtiers and diver- 
sions, 76, 81-88 ; aspires at the 
Regency for the Due, 89 ; efforts to 
know the terms of the King's will, 
102 - 105 ; recriminations at the 
decrees of; Parliament, 111-112 ; takes 
part in the quarrel between the 
princes, 119 ; accepts the services of 
adventurers, 123 ; despair over the 
defeat of her party, 124 ; plots 
against the Regent, 125-144 ; ar- 
rested and sent to Dijon, 151 ; moans 
over her captivity, 188-189 ; writes 
a confession, 190 ; released, 190 ; 
returns to Sceaux, 193-195 ; reorgan- 
ises her court, 207-208 ; her portrait, 
227 ; her tyrannies, 241-248 

Maintenon, Marquise de, 43, 46, 47, 
49, 95-97, 107 

Maisonrouge, Monsieur de, 170-186, 
205, 211 

Malezieu, Monsieur de, 54, 56-66, 189 

M6nil, Chevalier de, 141-145, 170-186, 
205 

Mesmes, President de, 104, 130 

Modfene, Duchesse de, 246-247 



Montauban, Mademoiselle de, 150, 170 
Montespan, Madame de, 44, 45 

Nantes, Mademoiselle de, 44, 48 
Nevers, Due de, 56, 57 
Noailles, Duchesse de, 35 

, Marquis de, 130, 200 

Novion, Comte de, 26 

Orlj^ans, Due d', the Regent, 44, 47, 
90, 96, 105-107, 111, 117-119, 129- 

151, 154-158 

, Duchesse d', 45, 118 

Philip V. of Spain, 104-125, 154-155, 

202 
Polignac, Cardinal de, 81, 119, 127-128, 

152, 194-195 

Pompadour, Marquis de, 126-128, 162, 

165, 207 
Portocarrero, Abbe de, 138-140 
Prie, Marquise de, 44 
Puget, 52 

Richelieu, Cardinal de, 22 

, Due de, 162, 165, 180-182 

Rochefoucauld, Due de la, 2, 200 

, Madame de la, 2-7 

Rohan, Cardinal de, 28, 29, 36, 61 

Sabran, Madame de, 140 

Saint-Aulaire, 87 

Saint-Simon, Due de, 49, 92, 101, 133- 

134, 140 
Silly, Marquis de, 10-20, 23, 72, 74, 80 

, Marquise de, 13-16 

Staal, Monsieur de, 217-222 
Stair, Lord, 129 

Toulouse, Comte de, 101, 104, 135 

Ursins, Princesse des, 97 
Uzes, Comtesse d', 77 



Vatel, 42 

Ventadour, Duchesse de, 2, 
Vertot, Abbg de, 6 
Villeroi, Mareehal de, 130 
Voltaire, 234-241 



3, 31, 61 



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